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Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp.
A girl made of glass. Gods and murders. A serial killer's friends. And a secret in a bottle. Four stories by Caryl Churchill. Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp. premiered at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs, London, in September 2019, in a production directed by James Macdonald. 'Caryl Churchill has remade the landscape of contemporary drama – and earned herself a place among the greats' - Guardian ‘I can see her just. Most people can’t see her at all.’
112 pages, Paperback
Published September 19, 2019
8 people are currently reading
67 people want to read
About the author
Caryl Churchill
94 books227 followersCaryl Churchill (born 3 September 1938) is an English dramatist known for her use of non-naturalistic techniques and feminist themes, dramatisation of the abuses of power, and exploration of sexual politics.[1] She is acknowledged as a major playwright in the English language and one of world theatre's most influential writers.
Her early work developed Bertolt Brecht's modernist dramatic and theatrical techniques of 'Epic theatre' to explore issues of gender and sexuality. From A Mouthful of Birds (1986) onwards, she began to experiment with forms of dance-theatre, incorporating techniques developed from the performance tradition initiated by Antonin Artaud with his 'Theatre of Cruelty'. This move away from a clear Fabel dramaturgy towards increasingly fragmented and surrealistic narratives characterises her work as postmodernist.
Prizes and awards
Churchill has received much recognition, including the following awards:
1958 Sunday Times/National Union of Students Drama Festival Award Downstairs
1961 Richard Hillary Memorial Prize
1981 Obie Award for Playwriting, Cloud Nine
1982 Obie Award for Playwriting, Top Girls
1983 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (runner-up), Top Girls
1984 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Fen
1987 Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy of the Year, Serious Money
1987 Obie Award for Best New Play, Serious Money
1987 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Serious Money
1988 Laurence Olivier/BBC Award for Best New Play, Serious Money
2001 Obie Sustained Achievement Award
2010 Inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
Plays
Downstairs (1958)
You've No Need to be Frightened (1959?)
Having a Wonderful Time (1960)
Easy Death (1960)
The Ants, radio drama (1962)
Lovesick, radio drama (1969)
Identical Twins (1960)
Abortive, radio drama (1971)
Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen, radio drama (1971)
Owners (1972)
Schreber's Nervous Illness, radio drama (1972) – based on Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution (written 1972)
The Judge's Wife, radio drama (1972)
Moving Clocks Go Slow, (1973)
Turkish Delight, television drama (1973)
Objections to Sex and Violence (1975)
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) [7]
Vinegar Tom (1976)
Traps (1976)
The After-Dinner Joke, television drama (1978)
Seagulls (written 1978)
Cloud Nine (1979)
Three More Sleepless Nights (1980)
Top Girls (1982)
Crimes, television drama (1982)
Fen (1983)
Softcops (1984)
A Mouthful of Birds (1986)
A Heart's Desire (1987)[18]
Serious Money (1987)
Ice Cream (1989)
Hot Fudge (1989)
Mad Forest (1990)
Lives of the Great Poisoners (1991)
The Skriker (1994)
Blue Heart (1997)
Hotel (1997)
This is a Chair (1999)
Far Away (2000)
Thyestes (2001) – translation of Seneca's tragedy
A Number (2002)
A Dream Play (2005) – translation of August Strindberg's play
Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2006)
Seven Jewish Children – a play for Gaza (2009)
Love and Information (2012)
Ding Dong the Wicked (2013)
Here We Go (play) (2015)
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caryl_Ch...
Her early work developed Bertolt Brecht's modernist dramatic and theatrical techniques of 'Epic theatre' to explore issues of gender and sexuality. From A Mouthful of Birds (1986) onwards, she began to experiment with forms of dance-theatre, incorporating techniques developed from the performance tradition initiated by Antonin Artaud with his 'Theatre of Cruelty'. This move away from a clear Fabel dramaturgy towards increasingly fragmented and surrealistic narratives characterises her work as postmodernist.
Prizes and awards
Churchill has received much recognition, including the following awards:
1958 Sunday Times/National Union of Students Drama Festival Award Downstairs
1961 Richard Hillary Memorial Prize
1981 Obie Award for Playwriting, Cloud Nine
1982 Obie Award for Playwriting, Top Girls
1983 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (runner-up), Top Girls
1984 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Fen
1987 Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy of the Year, Serious Money
1987 Obie Award for Best New Play, Serious Money
1987 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Serious Money
1988 Laurence Olivier/BBC Award for Best New Play, Serious Money
2001 Obie Sustained Achievement Award
2010 Inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
Plays
Downstairs (1958)
You've No Need to be Frightened (1959?)
Having a Wonderful Time (1960)
Easy Death (1960)
The Ants, radio drama (1962)
Lovesick, radio drama (1969)
Identical Twins (1960)
Abortive, radio drama (1971)
Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen, radio drama (1971)
Owners (1972)
Schreber's Nervous Illness, radio drama (1972) – based on Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution (written 1972)
The Judge's Wife, radio drama (1972)
Moving Clocks Go Slow, (1973)
Turkish Delight, television drama (1973)
Objections to Sex and Violence (1975)
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) [7]
Vinegar Tom (1976)
Traps (1976)
The After-Dinner Joke, television drama (1978)
Seagulls (written 1978)
Cloud Nine (1979)
Three More Sleepless Nights (1980)
Top Girls (1982)
Crimes, television drama (1982)
Fen (1983)
Softcops (1984)
A Mouthful of Birds (1986)
A Heart's Desire (1987)[18]
Serious Money (1987)
Ice Cream (1989)
Hot Fudge (1989)
Mad Forest (1990)
Lives of the Great Poisoners (1991)
The Skriker (1994)
Blue Heart (1997)
Hotel (1997)
This is a Chair (1999)
Far Away (2000)
Thyestes (2001) – translation of Seneca's tragedy
A Number (2002)
A Dream Play (2005) – translation of August Strindberg's play
Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2006)
Seven Jewish Children – a play for Gaza (2009)
Love and Information (2012)
Ding Dong the Wicked (2013)
Here We Go (play) (2015)
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caryl_Ch...
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
October 6, 2019
"...we can't do everything, we don't exist."
At 81, it appears Caryl Churchill is not happy to hold the title of Greatest Living Dramatist just based on her (ridiculously significant and influential) body of work pre-2000. She’s still pushing, still testing the limits of the form, still restless in her exploration of what exactly is necessary for drama to happen. These four plays are representative of the variety at which she excels, different forms drawing on images of the mythic and the fantastical.
Glass, about a girl made of glass (and the other residents of the mantlepiece) is particularly weird. There’s a red plastic dog that talks and it somehow makes sense. Sort of.
Kill is probably my favourite. The Gods sit and talk up above as People (might) interject with the occasional excusatory yell. It’s this long speech that starts with a weird commentary on the whole Clytemnestra/Agamemnon thing and ends with a linguistic collapse as the violence of the people spirals out of control.
Bluebeard’s Friends is the only play about #MeToo you would ever want to actually see. Imagining conversations between (you guessed it) Bluebeard’s friends after he’s finally been killed and exposed as a monster, it shows them managing the fallout. In lines that aren’t attributed to character, they cut up books, they wonder what his widow will do with his castle, they make reproductions of the wedding dresses. They do everything except actually grapple with the monstrous acts of their friend. It is also, I think, hard to not see an element of self-criticism in there, given Churchill’s own working relationship with Max Stafford Clark in the building these plays premiered in.
One of the things that has characterised Churchill’s last few plays has been the use of half-sentences and unfinished thoughts in the dialogue, understood to be an exercise in extreme minimalism. But Imp, the last play here, dismisses the idea of that as he ‘goal’. It’s a play in full sentences(!) with characters(!) and a mood and an ambiguity that brings to mind Pinter. An Imp is kept in a bottle. Maybe.
Together, these plays show a dramatist with an imagination still firmly in overdrive, still generating plays that intrigue, confuse, excite and astonish.
At 81, it appears Caryl Churchill is not happy to hold the title of Greatest Living Dramatist just based on her (ridiculously significant and influential) body of work pre-2000. She’s still pushing, still testing the limits of the form, still restless in her exploration of what exactly is necessary for drama to happen. These four plays are representative of the variety at which she excels, different forms drawing on images of the mythic and the fantastical.
Glass, about a girl made of glass (and the other residents of the mantlepiece) is particularly weird. There’s a red plastic dog that talks and it somehow makes sense. Sort of.
Kill is probably my favourite. The Gods sit and talk up above as People (might) interject with the occasional excusatory yell. It’s this long speech that starts with a weird commentary on the whole Clytemnestra/Agamemnon thing and ends with a linguistic collapse as the violence of the people spirals out of control.
Bluebeard’s Friends is the only play about #MeToo you would ever want to actually see. Imagining conversations between (you guessed it) Bluebeard’s friends after he’s finally been killed and exposed as a monster, it shows them managing the fallout. In lines that aren’t attributed to character, they cut up books, they wonder what his widow will do with his castle, they make reproductions of the wedding dresses. They do everything except actually grapple with the monstrous acts of their friend. It is also, I think, hard to not see an element of self-criticism in there, given Churchill’s own working relationship with Max Stafford Clark in the building these plays premiered in.
One of the things that has characterised Churchill’s last few plays has been the use of half-sentences and unfinished thoughts in the dialogue, understood to be an exercise in extreme minimalism. But Imp, the last play here, dismisses the idea of that as he ‘goal’. It’s a play in full sentences(!) with characters(!) and a mood and an ambiguity that brings to mind Pinter. An Imp is kept in a bottle. Maybe.
Together, these plays show a dramatist with an imagination still firmly in overdrive, still generating plays that intrigue, confuse, excite and astonish.
May 31, 2020
So. Damn. Clever.
July 14, 2022
Caryl Churchill’s in her 80s and she’s still writing rings around the rest of us. I really enjoyed reading this latest work of hers, a collection of 4 short plays that find contemporary resonances in myth and folklore.
The curtain-raiser, Glass, is a surrealistic fable that feels as though Churchill decided to take The Glass Menagerie one step further—instead of using glass figurines as a metaphor for a young girl’s vulnerability, she writes about a girl who is literally made of glass. Like Tennessee Williams’s play, Glass has moments of whimsy (a charming dialogue scene between the girl and household objects on the mantelpiece) and a downer ending. Life does not provide much happiness to the delicate and frail.
Kill is Churchill’s take on the myth of the House of Atreus, a subject she previously tackled by translating/adapting Seneca’s Thyestes . It is a very powerful thing when a late-career contemporary playwright enters into conversation with the oldest extant works of dramatic literature. Narrated by the lofty Gods, Churchill’s rendition is deliberately confusing, in order to emphasize this myth’s parade of horrors, its cycle of violence, and the way the cycle continues because we keep telling this ancient story.
Bluebeard’s Friends is a brilliant and timely satire: the variously shocked, confused, sympathetic, and dismissive reactions of a group of friends whose old pal Bluebeard has just been revealed as a wife-murdering serial killer. (“I can’t believe it, it makes me crazy, and he played the piano so beautifully.”) The play also tackles related issues like the ethics of reading books written by misogynists, the media’s fascination with true crime, and the corporate-feminist commodification of violence against women. The characters plan to make and sell copies of Bluebeard’s victims’ dresses and debate whether they should be “with or without bloodstains.” Without stains, someone posits, “you can sell that as the women unharmed, victims no longer, power dresses.” I’m also curious whether this play was inspired by the work of Angela Carter, a near-contemporary of Churchill’s, whose most famous piece (the title story of The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories ) is a Bluebeard retelling. After all, Churchill was born in 1938 and Carter in 1940, and they both wrote wild genre-breaking feminist works in the ‘70s and ‘80s that are far more popular and influential nowadays than when they were originally published/performed.**
Unlike the other plays, Imp is basically a realistic, sitting-room drama. Still, there’s something disquieting about it, even before the characters mention that they might have trapped a malevolent imp in an old bottle. And while the bottled imp could well be make-believe, the character of Niamh is afflicted by “the imp of the perverse”—obsessive, intrusive fantasies about doing self-destructive things (“I’m frightened I might give it all up and go back to Ireland. I don’t want to do that but I’m sitting in my office and think I could just stand up and walk out”). Meanwhile, Jimmy, Niamh’s cousin, repeats local gossip that echoes Greek and Shakespearean dramas (“There was that woman killed her children to get back at her husband, it was in the local paper did you see it?”). It is always dangerous to try to assign a definitive meaning to a Churchill play, but I think she might be saying: even though many stage plays nowadays are realistic stories about dysfunctional families in sitting rooms, we should never forget that theater originally sprang from our more wild, impish, unsettling impulses.
**UPDATE July 2022: I am rereading Churchill's The Skriker right now, another play on fairy tale/folklore themes, and in the Skriker's dense, allusive opening monologue, there's the line "Open bluebeard's one bloody chamber maid." Aaah!
The curtain-raiser, Glass, is a surrealistic fable that feels as though Churchill decided to take The Glass Menagerie one step further—instead of using glass figurines as a metaphor for a young girl’s vulnerability, she writes about a girl who is literally made of glass. Like Tennessee Williams’s play, Glass has moments of whimsy (a charming dialogue scene between the girl and household objects on the mantelpiece) and a downer ending. Life does not provide much happiness to the delicate and frail.
Kill is Churchill’s take on the myth of the House of Atreus, a subject she previously tackled by translating/adapting Seneca’s Thyestes . It is a very powerful thing when a late-career contemporary playwright enters into conversation with the oldest extant works of dramatic literature. Narrated by the lofty Gods, Churchill’s rendition is deliberately confusing, in order to emphasize this myth’s parade of horrors, its cycle of violence, and the way the cycle continues because we keep telling this ancient story.
Bluebeard’s Friends is a brilliant and timely satire: the variously shocked, confused, sympathetic, and dismissive reactions of a group of friends whose old pal Bluebeard has just been revealed as a wife-murdering serial killer. (“I can’t believe it, it makes me crazy, and he played the piano so beautifully.”) The play also tackles related issues like the ethics of reading books written by misogynists, the media’s fascination with true crime, and the corporate-feminist commodification of violence against women. The characters plan to make and sell copies of Bluebeard’s victims’ dresses and debate whether they should be “with or without bloodstains.” Without stains, someone posits, “you can sell that as the women unharmed, victims no longer, power dresses.” I’m also curious whether this play was inspired by the work of Angela Carter, a near-contemporary of Churchill’s, whose most famous piece (the title story of The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories ) is a Bluebeard retelling. After all, Churchill was born in 1938 and Carter in 1940, and they both wrote wild genre-breaking feminist works in the ‘70s and ‘80s that are far more popular and influential nowadays than when they were originally published/performed.**
Unlike the other plays, Imp is basically a realistic, sitting-room drama. Still, there’s something disquieting about it, even before the characters mention that they might have trapped a malevolent imp in an old bottle. And while the bottled imp could well be make-believe, the character of Niamh is afflicted by “the imp of the perverse”—obsessive, intrusive fantasies about doing self-destructive things (“I’m frightened I might give it all up and go back to Ireland. I don’t want to do that but I’m sitting in my office and think I could just stand up and walk out”). Meanwhile, Jimmy, Niamh’s cousin, repeats local gossip that echoes Greek and Shakespearean dramas (“There was that woman killed her children to get back at her husband, it was in the local paper did you see it?”). It is always dangerous to try to assign a definitive meaning to a Churchill play, but I think she might be saying: even though many stage plays nowadays are realistic stories about dysfunctional families in sitting rooms, we should never forget that theater originally sprang from our more wild, impish, unsettling impulses.
**UPDATE July 2022: I am rereading Churchill's The Skriker right now, another play on fairy tale/folklore themes, and in the Skriker's dense, allusive opening monologue, there's the line "Open bluebeard's one bloody chamber maid." Aaah!
April 23, 2021
Churchill really is a master! Even now she is still reinventing herself - plenty to unpick!
November 25, 2019
Now in her 80's, Churchill has lost none of her anarchistic and impish (pun intentional) charms, and keeps pushing the envelop on what drama can be. In one sense, these are rather tossed-off little bagatelles, but on the other they contain multitudes. I particularly liked the final, longest piece, Imp, which, if one blinked, could be mistaken for Pinter.
May 5, 2020
Unique British playwright.
May 6, 2020
Caryl Churchill is in her 80's, and she writes with more imagination and inventiveness than most playwrights in their twenties. These four short plays are meditations on violence and the loss of enchantment in the modern world.
"Glass" is a contemporary fairy tale, complete with a cast of animate objects such as a clock, a plastic dog, and the title figure, a glass ornament of a girl. "Kill" is a lengthy monologue from the point of view of the gods, who take us on a crash course of violent episodes from ancient myths and religious texts. "Bluebeard's Friends" is a series of vignettes about a group of friends who discover that someone in their close circle is a serial killer. It's the weakest play in the collection, only because I feel like Churchill could have gone deeper into the conceit; at six pages long, it feels like she only scratches the surface of the play's themes of culpability and the way we process, disavow and fetishize violence.
"Imp" is the longest play in the collection, and the strongest. The text concerns an older couple, Jimmy and Dot, and their two friends as they visit in their living room. Churchill unspools her plot with scrupulous care (it would be a disservice to reveal anything further!), and her attention to dialogue is as keen as ever. Churchill displays her mordant wit as she explores the anxieties of being elderly and the precariousness of present day middle-class life. "Imp's" minimalism and ingenious plot construction make it her strongest play since "Escaped Alone".
Be aware that Churchill's distinctive style in this collection is consistent with her other late-career works: an absence of stage directions, lengthy sentences, and dialogue presented without assigned characters. If you're new to Churchill, try reading these plays like a poem, i.e. more slowly than you world a more traditional play. If you read too quickly, I'm afraid you won't pick up on all of Churchill's nuances.
Here's hoping we get another collection of masterpieces from this unparalleled playwright.
"Glass" is a contemporary fairy tale, complete with a cast of animate objects such as a clock, a plastic dog, and the title figure, a glass ornament of a girl. "Kill" is a lengthy monologue from the point of view of the gods, who take us on a crash course of violent episodes from ancient myths and religious texts. "Bluebeard's Friends" is a series of vignettes about a group of friends who discover that someone in their close circle is a serial killer. It's the weakest play in the collection, only because I feel like Churchill could have gone deeper into the conceit; at six pages long, it feels like she only scratches the surface of the play's themes of culpability and the way we process, disavow and fetishize violence.
"Imp" is the longest play in the collection, and the strongest. The text concerns an older couple, Jimmy and Dot, and their two friends as they visit in their living room. Churchill unspools her plot with scrupulous care (it would be a disservice to reveal anything further!), and her attention to dialogue is as keen as ever. Churchill displays her mordant wit as she explores the anxieties of being elderly and the precariousness of present day middle-class life. "Imp's" minimalism and ingenious plot construction make it her strongest play since "Escaped Alone".
Be aware that Churchill's distinctive style in this collection is consistent with her other late-career works: an absence of stage directions, lengthy sentences, and dialogue presented without assigned characters. If you're new to Churchill, try reading these plays like a poem, i.e. more slowly than you world a more traditional play. If you read too quickly, I'm afraid you won't pick up on all of Churchill's nuances.
Here's hoping we get another collection of masterpieces from this unparalleled playwright.
May 26, 2024
(Bought at the Drama Book Store in NYC) Actually I bought a volume with these four short plays and six others but Goodreads didn't seem to have it. I bought it because the Public Theater has announced they will be presenting 3 of these 4 short works plus What If If Only instead of Bluebeard's Friends. Caryl Churchill is one of the most influential and important playwrights of her era. I first encountered her in the 1980s and '90s with the Public Theater productions of Fen, Top Girls, Serious Money, and The Skriker. Then New York Theater Workshop's A Number and Far Away; followed by Blue Heart at BAM and a brilliant revival of Cloud 9 at Atlantic Theater Company. She continues to reinvent herself and break all theatrical rules. While most authors stick to their signature style, everyone of her works is unique. Here the four pieces detail the impact of fantasy and folklore on modern life. A girl made of glass metaphorically breaks down. The Greek myths of murder are explored. Bluebeard gets the #MeToo treatment. An imaginary wishgranting imp influences four despondent people. Intriguing and haunting as are all of Churchill's works. I'm looking forward to seeing them on stage next year.
July 21, 2024
Glass - I am intrigued. I love some of Churchill's work but also think a lot of it is over-hyped so we'll see about these plays. I neither 'got' or 'enjoyed' this one, and I'm sure that's not the point, but I do wonder what it's doing artistically. ⭐️⭐️
Kill - an almost insane ramble that really just felt like deliberate obtuseness combined with mythological references to make the audience feel smart for understanding them ⭐️⭐️
Bluebeard's Friends - I actually really enjoyed this one, although I am partial to Bluebeard retellings. Far more than the other ones, this one has solid ideas to grasp onto while still being theatrically experimental ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Imp - some interesting ideas but I felt neither they nor the form were really pushed in any really innovative or meaningful way ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Kill - an almost insane ramble that really just felt like deliberate obtuseness combined with mythological references to make the audience feel smart for understanding them ⭐️⭐️
Bluebeard's Friends - I actually really enjoyed this one, although I am partial to Bluebeard retellings. Far more than the other ones, this one has solid ideas to grasp onto while still being theatrically experimental ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Imp - some interesting ideas but I felt neither they nor the form were really pushed in any really innovative or meaningful way ⭐️⭐️⭐️
February 4, 2023
Caryl Churchill is my favourite play write, and she just keeps serving us genius, now in her 80s. I saw this play at the Royal Court. Such a clever amalgamation of stories, thoughts, social dissections. I recommend this piece to the short story lovers too.
March 26, 2020
Saw these at the royal court - really liked them. All very different, and inventive in their own way... super flexible pieces, great to set your imagination off about staging and set!
September 1, 2021
I received a complimentary copy.
While some may get distracted by the play format, the way they are written and how well they fold you into the story lines is fantastic .
While some may get distracted by the play format, the way they are written and how well they fold you into the story lines is fantastic .
May 3, 2022
incredible !!! just wish i could have / will someday be able to see these live. IMP was my favourite of them all and the way Churchill handles her revelations will stay with me for some time.
July 22, 2024
Minor Churchill.
Only Imp has power.
Only Imp has power.
November 13, 2025
enjoyed Glass & Bluebeard's friends
abandoned Imp. (interest lost)
abandoned Imp. (interest lost)
October 30, 2019
I absolutely loved this script! A feat of writing, with enough stage direction that I could imagine exactly what I would see as I read it but sparse enough to allow lots of experimentation and interesting artistic choices when performed. Churchill discusses so many interesting and difficult ideas that she doesn't try to answer, simply poses the questions for audiences to wrestle with. Loved loved loved it!
November 30, 2019
Churchill constantly pushing boundaries of form and content in her work. These four vignettes, while not seeming to intertwine on the forefront old parallel themes and motifs. Each one a completely different style. While this isn't my favourite piece of her work, I feel there's a lot that could be played with by a director her to bring it to life.
October 21, 2024
Simply brilliant. Wonderful dialogue. I particularly appreciated the range of ages of the characters written for, from childhood to old age, which makes this like a set of engrossing, varied and surprising short stories.
October 19, 2019
Pushes your brain into new corners.
November 20, 2019
These are funny little plays; Thomas tells me they are fantastic in performance, and I can see that this might be so, but I found them very odd to read.
December 17, 2019
My first exposure to a Churchill play (three 'playets' and a thematically-related longer work in this case). Quite intriguing!!
December 19, 2019
The always inventive Caryl Churchill strikes again with four pieces that disturb in showing a core hunger for pain amid a lot of sadness in these mythologically-inspired shorts. Well worth the read.
January 15, 2020
Would've been four stars but out of the four I didn't really like Imp. Glass, Kill and Bluebeard were phenomenal though
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews