Picasso, In The Theater

Caryl Churchill is an outstanding contemporary British playwright, as well as the most welcomed female playwright and socialist-feminist playwright in the west. She has gained several awards, such as Obie Award, Evening Standard Award, West End Theatre Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, etc. Having employing Brechtian devices in general, her works become the new buds of Brechtian theatre in England. In addition, Churchill has widely experimented with some components of superrealism, absurdism, postmodernism, and even the cruel theatre. She has formed her own artistic spectacle and style, thus her creation is not pure Brechtian theatre, but post-Brechtian theatre,which provides fine and representative samples for incorporating social political function and entertaining function of theatre.Churchill's plays have broken through conventional epic theatre's subjects, texture, alienation method and narrative language, and have provided different spectacles and possibilities. As to subject, Churchill focuses upon contemporary important issues to raise political awareness of the audiences, such as power, gender politics, war, violence, alienation of the individual, environmental protection, familial relationships, slowness of social process, etc. On texture, Churchill develops dimensional composition with non-lineage narration, collage, counterpoint, variation, etc. She has broken through and broaden Brechtian playwriting devices with multiple alienation, including cross-dressing & cross-casting, alienation between scenes, irony caused by actions against theatrical titles and absurd performing. Churchill's dramatic languages take more on the characteristics of post-modernism than naturalism as is usually shown in Brechtian languages.Commitment to social change and the theatrical experimentation are successfully interwined in Caryl Churchill's plays. She continues to rediscover aesthetic tension in theatre, strengthen theatre's visual effects, startle and instruct audience, expand theatrical synthetic effects. Her theatre is a social theatre, meanwhile an experimental theatre, which is witty, original and artistic.