Prepare to Be Provoked. Caryl Churchill Is Back.

On a recent trip to London, I attempted to arrange an interview with Caryl Churchill, who alongside Tom Stoppard is considered the greatest living English playwright. I didn’t expect to get an answer (Churchill hasn’t granted a real interview since the 1990s) and, indeed, I did not get one. Trying to obtain an audience with her is like trying to obtain one with Thomas Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy. She maintains a Sphinx-like silence.

If you want to absorb a bit of Churchill’s London, however, the place to linger is the venerable Royal Court Theater, where many of her plays had their debuts. The Royal Court is a playwright’s arena, a word-drunk place, dedicated to new writing. John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” (1956) had its premiere there. So did Ann Jellicoe’s “The Knack” (1962), and Churchill’s own “Top Girls” (1982).

As I wandered the Royal Court, alone and with a guide, and saw a smart new play there (Thomas Eccleshare’s “Instructions for Correct Assembly”), I sensed that, handed a time machine, the play I’d most want to beam myself backward to witness on opening night might well be “Top Girls.”

In it, Churchill throws the greatest and most surreal dinner party of all time. She gathers around a table eminent women from various points in history, including the explorer Isabella Bird; the Japanese emperor’s courtesan and memoirist Lady Nijo; the subject of the Bruegel painting “Dulle Griet” (also known as Mad Meg); and Pope Joan, a woman thought to have been pope while disguised as a man from 855-858. These highly verbal women hash out their views on politics and sex and health and the patriarchy and religion (“I knew coming to dinner with a pope we should keep off religion,” Isabella cracks.) while ordering avocado vinaigrette and Waldorf salad and many bottles of wine. Lady Nijo gets off this line: “I’m not a cheerful person, Marlene. I just laugh a lot.”

Lucy Kirkwood, a fellow playwright, singled out Churchill’s commitment to experimentation in a glowing tribute this year. “Simply put,” Kirkwood said, “she is the only person writing today who says something new in both form and content every time she puts pen to paper.”

Critic Robert Brustein remarked that if moviegoing is a solitary act, theatergoing is a communal one. Few make this more apparent than does Churchill. For one thing, she has been known to squeeze a lot of human beings into her plays. One of her most intricate, “Love and Information,” which opened at the Royal Court in 2012 and ran off-Broadway two years later, has 100 characters (!) played by 16 actors.

More essentially, she is communal in her working methods. There is no other modern playwright quite like her. Her stage directions are few. She gives directors enormous leeway but often gives them little to go on.

Take, for example, Churchill’s 1976 play “Light Shining in Buckinghamshire,” which is in previews and opens May 7 at New York Theater Workshop. (It’s the eighth production of her work presented at the off-Broadway theater, and the first play it has ever done twice.) The director is Rachel Chavkin, who received a 2017 Tony Award nomination for “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.”

“Buckinghamshire” is a difficult, fervent, political play, set in England in the mid-1600s, and it’s about a time when a new kind of governance seemed possible. King Charles I has been imprisoned for corruption; royalists have fled their estates. Factions of Oliver Cromwell’s parliamentarians are trying to draft a new constitution.

Into this debate plunge the members of three new radical groups: the Diggers, the Ranters and the Levellers. Churchill’s play picks up from there. It takes its title from a Digger pamphlet titled “More Light Shining in Buckinghamshire,” which included this line: “You great Curmudgeons, you hang a man for stealing, when you yourselves have stolen from your brethren all land and creatures.” It’s a play about bravery and optimism.

Churchill did not compose this play in remote isolation. Instead she ran a three-week workshop with the actors during which, she has written, “through talk, reading, games and improvisations, we tried to get closer to the issues and the people. During the next nine weeks I wrote a script, and went on working on it with the company during the six-week rehearsal period.”

This collaborative method is part of what appeals to James C. Nicola, the longtime artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, about Churchill’s writing. He calls “Light Shining in Buckinghamshire” perhaps his favorite play of all time.

“Some playwrights are temperamentally suited to sitting alone at a desk, imagining a world, and they find it hard to hand the work over,” Nicola said. “Caryl is a writer but she’s also a theatermaker at heart. She says, I am going to put these things on the page, they are a scenario, a provocation, a challenge. I want to see what we come up with.”

Chavkin, too, likes Churchill’s process, but she was particularly drawn to this play’s urgent politics.

“In the run-up to the 2016 election, I remember discussing with Jim the possibility of doing Ionesco’s ‘Rhinoceros,'” she recalled. “But suddenly it was too late. The Rhino was in the White House. I began going to organizing meetings, and I wanted to feed that fire, not rub salt in the wound.”

Chavkin continued: “Although this play is about a revolution that did not quite happen, there was so much profound hope in the moment. All these individuals were saying things are unjust, and they wanted to change that.”

Churchill cooked dinner for Chavkin last summer in London. At 79, the playwright is still vital and working. Her most recent plays, “Here We Go,” about faith and mortality, and “Escaped Alone,” which envisions a dystopian future, appeared in 2015 and 2016.

She was born on the cusp of World War II. Her mother was a fashion model, her father a political cartoonist. After the war ended the family moved to Montreal. She went to college at Lady Margaret Hall, a woman’s college at Oxford University, where she began writing plays.

After college she wrote radio dramas for the BBC, married a barrister and had three sons. She later told an interviewer: “I was fed up with the situation I found myself in in the 1960s. I didn’t like being a barrister’s wife and going out to dinner with other professional people and dealing with middle-class life. It seemed claustrophobic. Having started out with undefined idealistic assumptions about the kind of life we could lead, we had drifted into something quite conventional and middle class and boring. By the mid-1960s, I had this gloomy feeling that when the revolution came I would be swept away.” Her early plays included “Owners” (1972), about landlords and greed, which had its premiere at the Royal Court, and “Buckinghamshire.” Her breakthrough arrived with “Cloud Nine” (1979), a play in which one act is set in Victorian times in colonial Africa and the other in a present-day London park. It’s a ferocious work that employs cross-gender casting and is about, among other things, sexual stereotypes.

Churchill won the first of her five Obie Awards in 1982 for “Cloud Nine.” She would win as well for “Top Girls,” “Serious Money” and “A Number,” in addition to one for lifetime achievement.

“Buckinghamshire” is not universally beloved. Writing in The Guardian in 2008, on the occasion of Churchill’s 70th birthday, English playwright Mark Ravenhill declared: “It is a play that is rich in language: prayer, debate, ecstatic meetings, the stumbling attempts of the newly empowered to find a voice.”

When the play was staged at London’s National Theater in 2015, however, critic Lloyd Evans, writing in The Spectator, used it as an occasion to drop an incendiary bomb on her entire oeuvre.

“The play is hopelessly ineffective on every level,” Evans wrote. “Churchill must be the most overrated writer the English theater has produced. She has virtually no dramatic skills. She can knock out humourless preachy rhetoric by the yard but as for the rest of it she hasn’t a clue.” He was just getting going.

Some Churchill plays are, for sure, easier to consume than others. One of her merits as a playwright is that she tends to divide people. You leave her plays mentally ablaze, eager to argue. “Buckinghamshire” is a waterfall of antique language, and Chavkin wants to make sure that the language is heard. “We’re working to make the language chewy rather than floaty,” she said. “We want it to sound not like Shakespeare but like something you could hear in a bar in Bushwick.”

The production features several actors with disabilities. “This is a play about collective liberation and features a slew of characters who are fighting for acknowledgment, equality and liberty,” Chavkin explained. “So the humans in the cast should reflect and embody that as powerfully as possible.”

Another unusual feature of her production is a captioning board, visible at the back of the stage, for the hearing-impaired. Others may also find it useful at times, like supertitles during an opera. The language is indeed chewy, but it is a lot to bite off.

At the Royal Court, Churchill’s language lingers in the air. To stand in that theater is to be reminded of something the playwright said about “Buckinghamshire,” which is that if the men and women in it are historically remote, “their voices are surprisingly close to us.”