Against the backcloth of Euripides' The Bacchae, the most darkly anarchic and sexually disturbing drama in Greek literature, Caryl Churchill, author of Top Girls (Royal Court, 1982) and David Lan, author of Flight (RSC, 1986), working with Joint Stock Theater Group, have created a contemporary play of startling intensity combining drama and dance.

A Mouthful of Birds (Methuen New Theatrescript)

Literature & Fiction

Churchill, Caryl

Lan, David

Dramas & Plays

METHUEN

Serious Money is a Jonsonian satire about capitalism running rampant and unchecked. All money corrupts and serious money corrupts absolutely in the play's world of shady financial deals, insider trading and get rich quick wheeler dealers of both sexes. Not only does the play capture almost every aspect of dirty dealing and money grubbing from London to Wall Street, but it does so in extremely ingenious rhymed couplets!

Serious Money (Royal Court Writers)

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

Heinemann

SOFTCOPS & FEN

Annotated student edition of landmark 1980s drama in which a cast of historical female protagonists, including a Japanese courtesan, Pope Joan, and a character from a Brueghel painting are brought together to recount their personal stories in a London restaurant. Includes notes, background to the play and discussion of various interpretations.Caryl Churchill lives in London and is one of Britain's most important playwrights.

Top girls (The Royal Court writers series)

Methuen in association with the Royal Court Theatre

Val leaves her husband and family for Frank, a farm worker, and Mr. Tewson contemplates selling his family farm

Fen (Methuen New Theatrescript)

Marlene hosts a dinner party in a London restaurant to celebrate her promotion to managing director of 'Top Girls' employment agency. Her guests are five women from the past: Isabella Bird (1831- 1904) - the adventurous traveller; Lady Nijo (b1258) - the mediaeval courtesan who became a Buddhist nun and travelled on foot through Japan; Dull Gret, who as Dulle Griet in a Bruegel painting, led a crowd of women on a charge through hell; Pope Joan - the transvestite early female pope and last but not least Patient Griselda, an obedient wife out of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. As the evening continues we are involved with the stories of all five women and the impending crisis in Marlene's own life. A classic of contemporary theatre, Churchill's play is seen as a landmark for a new generation of playwrights. It was premiered by the Royal Court in 1982.
"Top Girls has a combination of directness and complexity which keeps you both emotionally and intellectually alert. You can smell life, and at the same time feel locked in an argument with an agile and passionate mind." (John Peter, Sunday Times)

Top Girls

Humor & Entertainment

Methuen Publishing

In Traps, a set of characters meet themselves and their pasts to create "plenty of sinewy lines and joyous juxtapostions" (Plays and Players); Vinegar Tom "is set in the world of seventeenth-century witchcraft, but it speaks, through its striking images and its plethora of ironic contradictions, of and to this century..." (Tribune); Light Shining in Buckinghamshire is set during the Civil War and "unflinchingly shows the intolerance that was the obverse side of the demand for common justice. Deftly, it sketches in the kind of social conditions.. that led to hunger for revolution...The play has an austere eloquence that precisely matches its subject." (The Guardian) Cloud Nine sheds light on some of the British Empire's repressed dark side and is "a marvelous play - sometimes scurrilous, always observed with wicked accuracy, and ultimately, surprisingly, rather moving. It plunges straight to the heart of the endless convolutions of sexual mores...and does so with acrobatic wit." (Guardian) Owners:"I was in an old woman's flat when a young man offering her money to move came round, that was one of the starting points of the play" (Caryl Churchill). The plays in this volume represent the best of Churchill's writing up to and including her emergence onto the international theatre scene with Cloud Nine.

Churchill Plays: 1: Owners; Traps; Vinegar Tom; Light Shining in Buckinghamshire; Cloud Nine (Contemporary Dramatists)

Methuen Drama

Softcops renders the philosophy of Foucault as a music-hall turn and Victorian freakshow "theatre and history combine to give such intelligent fun" (TLS); Top Girls brings five great and less-than-great women from history together for a dinner party and "has a combination of directness and complexity which keeps you both emotionally and intellectually alert" (Sunday Times); Fen scrutinises the lives of the low-paid women potato pickers of the fens (in Eastern England) and "the playwright pins down her poetic subject matter in dialogue of impressive vigour and economy" (Financial Times) while Serious Money is a satirical study of the effects of the Big Bang - "Pure genius...the first play about the city to capture the authentic atmosphere of the place." (Daily Telegraph)

Churchill Plays 2: Softcops; Top Girls; Fen; Serious Money (Contemporary Dramatists)

"A breathless, exhilarating crash course in the low morality of high finance" (Independent)Serious Money is perhaps Caryl Churchill's most notorious play. A satirical study of the effects of the Big Bang, it premiered at the Royal Court in 1987 and transferred to the West End. Since then, it has prompted city financiers the world over to applaud and decry its presentation of their lives. British Telecom refused to provide telephones for the Wyndham's production, writing to say that "This is a production with which no public company would wish to be associated".

Serious Money (Methuen Modern Plays)

Business & Money

The three lives in question are those of Crippen, Medea and Madame de Brinvilliers, a notorious 17th-century french aristocrat who poisoned for money, for convenience and finally just for fun. But a further poisoner moves around these stories - Thomas Midgley, inventor of leaded petrol and CFCs, and inadvertently the "greatest" poisoner in history. This musical theatre script was performed at the Riverside Studios, London in 1991. This production dossier also includes statements explaining the genesis of the piece by Caryl Churchill, choreographer Ian Spink and designer Antony MacDonald with music by Orlando Gough.

LIVES OF GREAT POISONERS

Arts & Photography

Music

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