EVOLUTION OF CARYL CHURCHILL AS A TRENDSETTING FEMINIST DRAMATIST

Caryl Churchill was born on September 3, 1938 to Robert Churchill, apolitical cartoonist and Jan, a model and film actress. Hence, Caryl had a fair understanding of dramatic feelings and socio political scenario. Churchill, Caryl once said, “Cartoons are really so much like plays,”… “an image with somebody saying something. I grew up with his cartoons of the war of Goebbels and Mussolini.”However, at the time of her birth no one could actually foretell how amazingly the child was going to revolutionize the world of theatre with her radical perspectives and projections in her literary work. From 1948 to 1955, Caryl lived with her parents in Canada which was quite a progressive society, so she developed her own exclusive ideas about women existence. She progressed confidently into the jurisdictions of theatre, challenging its limits by employing its own vivacity against the obsolete theatrical conventions. She graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University in 1957, she developed a strong sense of drama. Deeply influenced by the dramatic artworks of Samuel Buckett, John Osborne and T.S. Eliot, she started writing short plays. With Churchill, as critic Benedict Nightingale once commented, “We can no longer patronise women playwrights as peripheral.”