I

Caryl Churchill is, in the best sense, a playwright of ideas. In her early works, she took inspiration from the theories of such writers as Sigmund Freud (Schreber's Nervous Illness), Frantz Fanon and R. D. Laing (The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution), and Michel Foucault (Softcops). Speaking of one of the dramas that made her name, she remarked that “Fanon's Black Faces, White Masks was one of the things (along with Genet) that led to Joshua, the black servant, being played by a white in Cloud Nine.”¹ Moreover, Churchill's eclectic reading in philosophy, psychology, and politics informs the structure and production process of her drama, as well as its content. Softcops is not just a witty dramatization of ideas from Discipline and Punish; the play presents itself as a species of enacted theatrical theory, a series of elegant, Foucauldian inquiries into the politics of performance: Can punishment be adequately staged? Can theater function viscerally to arouse and quell the spectator when it exposes the workings of its own controlling mechanisms? In short, Churchill's work is not merely drama concerned with particular intellectual trends, but a linked theatrical practice and poetics—in a sense, a drama that attempts to stage the radical implications of theory. This claim allies Churchill with predecessors as disparate as Gertrude Stein, whose theatrical art constitutes a highly intellectualized criticism of theatrical art, and Brecht, whose alienating dramaturgy exposes the workings of ideology, giving “what is ‘natural’ the force of what is startling.”² The analogy between Brecht's techniques and those of dramatists strongly influenced by socialism, like Churchill, has often been remarked;³ what I want to emphasize, however, is not continuity of form, or shared political lineage, but a common philosophical interrogation of the theatrical process. Churchill, like Stein, invigorates potentially abstract intellectual discourse by putting it into play.

In certain crucial respects, Fen is typical of Churchill's dramatic practice. Fen engages an emerging body of theory that links a socialist-feminist critique with ecological politics—what has come to be called “ecofeminism.” Churchill strives to bind the theatrical practice of her drama to the theory in which the play is grounded, and this effort lends Fen much of its complexity and interest. The project is far from straightforward, however. For when Churchill attempts, by disclosing the means and methods of dramatic production, to reshape the relation between aesthetic and material culture—to create, figuratively speaking, an ecologically sound process of theatrical production—the inadequacies and inherent contradictions of this processual resolution are exposed by the premises of materialist analysis itself. Moreover, Fen stages a brief but canny critique of its own processes that hints at a broader potential interrogation of socialist-feminist dramatic practice.

The work of a founding practitioner, Vendana Shiva, may help to clarify what I mean by ecofeminism. In Staying Alive, and more recently in The Violence of the Green Revolution, Shiva argues that the productive powers of both nature and women have been devalued and destroyed by the transformation from self-sustaining commons to privatized, revenue-generating land dependent on monoculture, technocracy, and debt. This “maldevelopment” (ongoing since the 17th century in Europe, and increasingly now in the “developing” countries) leaches away the essential wealth of the land—its capacity to renew itself—and destroys the basis of women's productivity, their role in drawing the elements of human subsistence from the land, as resources are removed from their control and incorporated into a patriarchal, capitalist system of ownership and production. As Shiva explains, destruction and devaluation are profoundly linked: “Patriarchal categories which understand destruction as ‘production’ and regeneration of life as ‘passivity’ have generated a crisis of survival. Passivity, as an assumed category of the ‘nature’ of nature and of women, denies the activity of nature and life.”⁴ Historically, the work of women generated much of the commons' sustaining and sustainable wealth. Shiva terms this mode of intimate and subtly responsive engagement with the natural world “the feminine principle,” which “dies simultaneously in women, men, and nature when violence and aggression become the masculine model of activity, and women and nature are turned into passive objects of violence.”⁵

Shiva's work helps to illuminate the general praxis of ecofeminist theater and in particular the problematic attempt in Churchill's Fen to merge ecological and socialist-feminist concerns. Ecofeminist theater is a growing body of plays and performance pieces that work to expose the cracks in the apparently seamless, and distinctly gendered, ideological structures governing our relationship to the environment. Such theater strives to disentangle an ideological complex in which masculinist values render “natural” a capitalist approach to the “development” of the world's resources, and capitalism—with its valorization of aggression, competition, possession—in turn reinforces a particular construction of the dominant gender. While ecofeminist theater does not yet constitute a concerted movement, a variety of recent plays employ such strategies: Rona Munro's exploration of gender, violence, and mythic constructions of the Scottish seashore in Piper's Cave; Margaret Hollingsworth's The House That Jack Built, with its slyly comic treatment of the gender stereotypes driving Toronto's suburban sprawl; Monique Mojica's Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, a cabaret-style performance satirizing white conquest of the hearts of Indian Maidens and their land.

While Shiva's work was not a specific source for Fen, it provides a paradigm of the ecofeminist thought that shapes Churchill's play because of the clarity (and poetic vigor) with which Shiva deploys Marxist and feminist critiques in her analysis of environmental use. Churchill clearly shares her commitment to socialism as well as feminism, and has stated that she “wouldn't be interested in a form of one that didn't include the other.”⁶ The play's provisional title revealed her fundamental concern with the economic basis of women's lives—Strong Girls Always Hoeing, taken from an 1842 agricultural report advising employers that “strong girls who are always hoeing can do the work better than men and they cost only 1/6 instead of 2/.”⁷ Churchill's final choice of title, however, locates her drama in the land itself; as Shiva does, she strives to place feminist and Marxist concerns within a larger, more elemental frame.

Fen's sequence of 21 scenes offers a series of images that associate exploited land with oppressed women workers, a baseline of misery figured in the conjunction of the bare horizontal line of the fields and the bodies of women literally bent to the earth in toil. Annie Smart, the designer for the original production, created a single set: a surface of furrowed earth bounded on three sides by rough board walls that was at once a field and a domestic interior. As Sylviane Gold commented in her Wall Street Journal review of the 1983 New York production, the furrows “dirty the boots of the laborers, of course; but they also soil a dropped teacup, or the clothing of embracing lovers.” The bond between the lives of the women and the fate of the land is inescapable; in the closing scene Churchill reemphasizes the implications of the set—the women's constant labor, domestic and agricultural, sustaining the agribusiness of the fens—as Shirley irons the field.

The earth that clings to their garments and marks their every move is also a reminder that the lives of these women, vividly characterized though they are, cannot be understood solely in terms of individual choice and psychology; or, rather, that their psyches are themselves touched by the earth. Thus, the close of the play confronts the audience with images of cruelty, rebellion, and pain, with the possibility that to follow one's desires in this flat, limited world is a form of “madness”: Val, who sought romantic love, persuades her lover to kill her; Nell, who intransigently protests exploitation, stalks crazily through the scene on stilts, claiming the sun spoke to her. One grim note of hope is sounded by Shirley—a woman habitually encased in a stoic pride in her own capacity for endurance—who for an instant realizes that it is a greater madness still to accept such a world: “I'd forgotten what it was like to be unhappy. I don't want to.”

At the same time as the stage set linked the women and the land they worked, it created a spatial hierarchy, a visual language that lifted some into power and bent others towards the soil that carpeted the stage. It is hard to imagine a more visceral demonstration of the twinned devaluation of woman and natural world. There are few men in the piece (only one male actor in the original cast of six), and each of them is in some way, if only slightly, elevated above the women (with the exception of Miss Cade, supervisor of the field gang, and the bird-scaring boy, played by a woman). Wilson, a boy of 16 who works the potato fields with them, separates himself from the crew of women by begging to pick Val's rows for her pay when she walks off the job; Frank, though tormented by his affair with Val, rides above the fields on a tractor (composed of chairs); Towson, bought out by a syndicate, still lives a farm owner's comfortable life and influences the economic fate of the farm employees; and the Japanese businessman, Mr. Takai, reflects the divorce from the true nature of the land brought about by ownership, capital investment, “development.” Virtually all the males enjoy a higher status than the women; in terms of the visual economy, likewise, they rise above the lowest common denominator, the rows of dirt—and the greater the power, the more instruments (mechanical and financial) intervene between them and the earth that generates their wealth. Towson, the farmer, is insulated from the land by technological comforts (“You never see a farmer on a bike,” Nell says sarcastically) and by a financing scheme through which he relinquishes ownership and renounces a large degree of responsibility for the fate of the land and its workers in order to avoid death duties. As Nell says, his workers don't know who the boss is: “Who do you have a go at? Acton's was Ross, Ross is Imperial Foods, Imperial Foods is Imperial Tobacco, so where does that stop?”

The greatest distance from the soil, and hence the greatest power, is embodied in Mr. Takai, executive of the vast international corporation that, at many removes, owns the land. It is he, therefore, who addresses the audience in the first speech of the play and welcomes us in a fashion that suggests the land has been transformed utterly into a mere representation, both theatrical and monetary: “Mr. Takai, Tokyo Company, welcomes you to the fen. Most expensive earth in England. Two thousand pounds acre.” There is more than a hint, here, of what Terry Eagleton, in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, has called the Marxist sublime—a linking of representation and exchange value, as in the Eighteenth Brumaire, that implies representation itself must be broken and exceeded. For Mr. Takai, the fens are so foreign as to be realized only in the aesthetic realm: “How beautiful English countryside. I think it is too foggy to take pictures. Now I find teashop, warm fire, old countryman to tell tales.”

Mr. Takai's tourist itinerary evokes something of the vexed relationship between Churchill's critique of production and her own artistic modes of production; but most plainly, his monologue is a history of the destruction of the fenland commons:

Long time ago, under water. Fishes and eels swimming here. Not true people had webbed feet but did walk on stilts. Wild people, fen tigers. In 1630 rich lords planned to drain fen, change swamp into grazing land, far thinking men, brave investors. Fen people wanted to keep fishes and eels to live on, no vision. Refuse work on drainage, smash dikes, broke sluices. Many problems. But in the end we have this beautiful earth. Very efficient, flat land, plough right up to edge, no waste. This farm, one of our twenty-five farms, very good investment. Belongs to Baxter Nolesford Ltd., which belongs to Reindorp Smith Farm Land trust, which belongs 65٪ to our company.

An initial positive image of the “wild people, fen tigers” hovers behind the historic layers of suffering that are shaded into the play by reminiscences, gruesome old tales, and fleeting appearances of figures from the past. As Mr. Takai identifies with the “far thinking men, brave investors” of 17th-century venture-capital development, Churchill provides the opposing images that determine the interpretive frame of the play: commons and capitalism, what Shiva calls the feminine and the masculine principles in human relations to nature and society.

If the majority of the play that follows evokes the ethos of the commons by its absence, the closing scene presents one figure reminiscent of the wild marsh, as if inspired by Mr. Takai's opening history: Nell, walking on stilts across the earth-strewn stage. Churchill employs a structural symmetry here that emphasizes the importance of both “masculine” and “feminine” principles to our understanding of the play: where Mr. Takai's monologue brought the lost commons before the mind's eye inadvertently, as it were, by praising its destruction and rationally advocating the virtues of capitalist development, the closing scene also offers a monologue, though one that strikingly evades the structures of rationality and allows the voices of those who have suffered under “development” to speak through the character of Val.

Val has begged Frank to kill her; finally, he picks up an axe, murders her, puts her body in a wardrobe, and sits on the floor with his back against the wardrobe door. As he sits there, Val comes in through the door on the opposite side of the stage. She now utters a series of dream-like, subtly connected fragments that express her own misery but also describe the lives and fates of suffering figures from the past and present who seem to be pressing themselves on her consciousness:

There's so many of them all at once. He drowned in the river carrying his torch and they saw the light shining up through the water.

There's the girl again, a long time ago when they believed in boggarts.

The boy died of measles in the first war.

After some struggle, Val focuses on one figure—“the girl”—and recites the story of a weak, white child who, in a hard winter when many people died, spoke a wish to see the spring again even if she lived no longer than the cowslips at her gate. (“The mother says, ‘Hush, the boggarts'll hear you.’”) The green mist of spring comes, and with it her strength, but a boy picks the flowers and she dies. “She's a wrinkled white dead thing like the cowslips.” This uncanny folk tale, echoing something of Val's own death-wish, seems to arise from a collective memory of deprivation and speaks of a suffering so cruel that the fenlanders imagined malevolent spirits at work. But Val, who says she has come “back in” from death, is open to the experience of the living as well—especially, it seems, their terrors. The next section of her monologue describes young Becky's mind as she sleeps: “She's having a nightmare. She's running downstairs away from Angela. She's out on the road but she can't run fast enough.” Val's monologue conjures up all that is omitted from Mr. Takai's tidy history of economic conquest, and suggests by its structure—which evokes the upwelling powers of repressed anger, fear, and desire—not simply lives and facts forgotten in his account, but a radically different understanding of the world.

Indeed, even the boundaries of the monologue form, and the subjecthood it implies, become blurred. Val's ability to describe a nightmare as it is being dreamed by another character suggests a strangely permeable, though still tenable, subjectivity; however, when the words of the monologue suddenly conjure Becky herself onto the stage and the girl's own speech takes up the thread of Val's description, divisions between dialogue and monologue, separations on which conventional characterization are based, grow indistinct.

VAL:
Instead of waking up in bed she's falling into another dream and she's here. Becky is there.
BECKY:
I want to wake up.

Within the destabilizing context created by Val's monologue, Nell makes her appearance too, as do Angela, Shirley, and Meg, in a setting freed from the usual temporal restrictions: dramatic chronology has been disrupted by Val's return; historic past and present mingle in the same stage space; and Meg's “song”—she does not open her lips—disturbs performance time and seems to belong to the time of what might have been and cannot quite be represented (Val: My mother wanted to be a singer. That's why she'd never sing). The audience may read Nell's stilt-walk in a number of ways: as if she is a historic figure from the lost marshes; as a present-day fenlander with an odd and nonconformist streak (the village children call her a hermaphrodite) that makes her a virtual anachronism in a capitalist system designed to render each worker exchangeable for any other; or, in this temporally fluid context, as part of a past that could have been and a future that might be.⁸ Nell's elevation above the dirt plane of the stage might seem to disrupt the visual hierarchy established earlier in the play, but the ambiguity of her position in space (as well as time) again allows us to read her figure in multiple fashion: as elevated into power, and yet (unlike Frank, Towson, or Mr. Takai) as vitally connected with the soil. The people who walked the marshes on their stilts gathering fish and wild plants walked through the watery meadows, not above them, stepping delicately into the yielding, saturated earth like great wading birds. While Nell's action, like that of the silent/singing Meg, makes us aware of the limits of systems of representation by breaching familiar conventions, it suggests, as well, an alternative to the limitations of a “masculine” power identified with distance from the earth—with the physical and monetary transformation of the natural world into commodity for exchange.

II

One of the most complex links between Fen and ecofeminist theory lies in the process of the play's composition. As a Joint Stock production, Fen may be said to constitute a kind of creative “commons”—like a great deal of contemporary feminist drama, Fen was created in part collaboratively.⁹ Moreover, both on the page and in program notes, the play has been framed in such a way as to make the audience aware of the collective nature of its creation. Foregrounding of the production process has come to mark the practice of feminist theater for a variety of reasons. In much radical feminist theater, such gestures may invoke solidarity between audience and actors, and assert a new valuation of the work of women. More generally, the uncovering of the processes of production and performance, including the mutual construction of meaning by stage and audience, serves to expose and render non-natural the performance of gender. As we interrogate the significance of the gesture Fen makes in disclosing its process of production, however, we find a situation made more complex by Churchill's own self-conscious attempt to enact an alternative to the capitalist model of the production and ownership of aesthetic goods—an effort to construct in the aesthetic realm not simply a critique of the capitalist economy but a commons that somehow escapes it. A review of the remarkable process of bringing Fen into being may be helpful here.

Though the Joint Stock company was made up of a constantly changing membership, old hands tried to communicate the values of the group to newcomers, and these values had been shaped by the development and production of David Hare's Fanshen (1975), a play based on William Hinton's sympathetic study of communist land reform in a Chinese village during the 1940s. Joint Stock strove to incorporate democratic and collaborative methods into every stage of the productive process, though various members admitted that the directors still retained a degree of authority and the writers—after a collective workshop period—did retreat into privacy for nine weeks or so in order to produce the dramatic text, which would then be modified to varying degrees during rehearsal.¹⁰

While Churchill has produced other dramas by means of the company's characteristic process of isolated writing combined with collaborative research, rehearsal, and revision, she has commented that “Fen is the most documentary of the plays,”¹¹ growing not merely from collaboration among company members, and the influence of Mary Chamberlain's oral history, Fen-women, but through a direct encounter with the people and the land. The company lived for two weeks in a cottage in Upwell, in the heart of the fens. Jennie Stoller, one of the actors, reports in The Joint Stock Book: “Unlike other workshops we did not go our separate ways at the end of the day so there was an added intensity to the work. We cooked together, read together, combed the village for people, stories, ideas, images—and fought like mad to get into the bathroom.” Four of the company spent a day fruit-picking for a local farmer.

As the company tried to organize its work on the model of the communal labor and collective decision-making in the communist village of Fanshen, it also attempted—at least in some degree—to write both from and for the experience of Upwell. Acting exercises included the movements of stoop labor; one of the actors reported she would never eat “crisps” again without thinking of the toil of potato growing. Although they could not perform Fen in Upwell because there was no suitable venue, when one of the villagers they had interviewed, a Mrs. Parrish, traveled to a nearby town with her husband to see the show, the company made certain to ask them what they thought of it. Mr. Parrish informed one of the actors that he had had his hoe the wrong way round. What's important here is not that the production fell short of accuracy in some minor details or that the actors strove to immerse themselves in the arduous experience of Upwell life, but rather that in the company's attempt to enact the rigors of agricultural labor there was a kind of ingenuous desire to elide the gap between production and artistic reproduction, between quotidian existence and representation. Yet at the same time Churchill's feminist socialism provides a frame in which such efforts, which risk being perceived as naive, become cannily ironized.

While Marxist theory taught us that the tangled processes of cultural production are always inscribed unconsciously in the literary text, Churchill deliberately marks the published text of her play with evidence of a collective creativity, eschewing artistic ownership—or what one might call the capitalist model of aesthetic production. Churchill's introduction to Plays: Two announces that “Fen is a play with more direct quotes of things people said to us than any other I've written”; five quotations from fenland villagers are used as epigraphs to the play-text; a note acknowledges the brilliant contribution of the set designer Annie Smart to the effect of the original production. It is this highly self-conscious effort to impose an alternative economy—a species of literary commons—upon the artistic process that generates much of Fen's instructive tension. For Churchill proposes, it would seem, to evade the inescapable, to make conscious the unconscious reproduction of ideology.

There are problems with Churchill's attempt to engage directly with material production both in the subject and the mode of creation of her play. Her rejection of Romantic notions of authorship and private artistic possession in favor of an aesthetic commons may in fact constitute a new leftist romanticization of the author. But more disturbingly, the classic Marxist critique that underlies Churchill's approach as well as Shiva's theory suggests that the relationship between literary “superstructure” and economic “base” is far more subtle and complex than this simple collective transformation may allow. By joining a company that organizes its aesthetic labor in such a fashion, and representing this as a means of transforming the nature of the relation between the literary artifact and its subject, Churchill implies that her collaborative creation can somehow establish a critical position detached from the unconscious, profoundly wedded, economic and cultural processes of her capitalist society. Churchill proposes a restructuring of the bond between aesthetic and material production characteristic of a familiar brand of feminist literary praxis, yet the very self-consciousness with which she pursues this identification between modes of production is potentially subversive of her effort. Churchill here struggles to accomplish a radical rethinking of the processes of ideology. Ironically, it may be her failure that is in the end of most interest, her effort to register the complex ecology of life producing aesthetic consciousness.

Churchill herself seems to acknowledge the difficulty of making overt the workings of the political unconscious. Some of her earlier works have taken for their subject precisely the inescapable and complicated relation of “base” to “superstructure.” (As Raymond Williams reminds us in Marxism and Literature, the metaphor of base and superstructure itself, suggesting the spatial separation of a structure laid atop a foundation, falsifies by dividing what is intrinsically bonded.) Not … not … not … not … not Enough Oxygen, a vision of the future in which the earth's ecosystem has been destroyed by pollution, incorporates within its dystopia the notion of nature technologized and aestheticized. Both science and art are part of the systems of control: oxygen is purchased and sprayed from a bottle when needed; a park provides a glimpse of the “natural” world like an exhibition in a museum. The After Dinner Joke explores in broad, satiric fashion the difficulties of a young woman trying to escape from participation in politics and business as usual. Though she has quit her job to work for an international relief organization, she finds that everything she does in the end contributes to the well-being of established governments and global capitalism. She rejoins her old firm with a valuable line added to her resume: “It's what I like to see, Miss Selby, a young person spending a year or two working for charity,” says her boss. “I'll be able to bring you in at the management level.”

One self-reflexive moment in Fen, in particular, invites a meditation on the complexities of the production of aesthetic consciousness. It is a moment that evokes the various and perhaps contradictory uses that her play might serve for different audiences—rural and urban, bourgeois and working class—as well as the subtlety and indirectness of the nevertheless indissoluble connections between material production, political and cultural institutions and activity, and consciousness. Angela, flirting unsuccessfully with Frank in the pub, complains that he is dull and flat like the fen landscape around them and announces that she wants to live “in the country.” When Frank asks, “What's this then?” she replies “I like more scenery. The Lake District's got scenery. We went there on our honeymoon. He said we were going to live in the country. I wouldn't have come. Real country is romantic. Away from it all. Makes you feel better.” This exchange alludes to a pastoral image of English rural life that Churchill is in the process of destroying for her mostly bourgeois audiences. The persistence of that aesthetic here among the fen dwellers she depicts reminds us that it is her art, her distanced perspective, not deep experience of the material “facts” of fen life, that destroys an ideal still held by some who live in the countryside; and that the art itself uneasily aspires both to express and transform the desires of a deeply divided culture. The moment discloses a disjunction between the material life of the fens and the creative process that Churchill elsewhere attempts to bind to it. In the end, such disjunctions evoke an absent solidarity, a perfect congruence between an ideal material and aesthetic production, a missing commons that escapes the systems of representation.

To return to Mr. Takai, the emblem for Churchill's uneasy and fascinating negotiations may well be this slightly embarrassing stereotype whose single speech yokes a paradigm of capitalist development, the historical memory of a lost commons, and—within the context of the businessman's own production of an aesthetic picturesque—a peculiarly self-conscious allusion to Churchill's creative method of gathering from the common mind of the people: “Now I find teashop, warm fire, old countryman to tell tales.”

Notes

1. In “Introduction,” Churchill: Shorts (London: Nick Hern Books, 1990), unnumbered. In the same introduction Churchill comments that Hospital “combined my interest in Fanon and in Laing.” Daniel Paul Schreber, who was a patient of Freud, wrote an account of his peculiar case—Memoirs of My Nervous Illness—on which Churchill's drama is based. Softcops, she recalls, was written in 1978, after reading Foucault's Surveiller et Punir. “It fitted so well with what I was thinking about that I abandoned the play I was groping towards and quickly wrote something that used Foucault's examples as well as his ideas.” In “Introduction,” Plays: Two (London: Methuen, 1990), ix.

2. Bertolt Brecht, “Theater for Pleasure or Theater for Instruction,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 71.

3. Among many instances, see, for example, Elin Diamond, “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism,” The Drama Review 32.1 (1988): 82–94; Janelle Reinelt, “Beyond Brecht: Britain's New Feminist Drama,” Theatre Journal 38.2 (1986): 154–63; or Griselda Pollock's analysis of feminist film-making, “Screening the seventies: sexuality and representation in feminist practice—a Brechtian perspective,” in Vision and Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 155–199.

4. Vendana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (London: Zed Books, 1989), 3.

5. Ibid., 53.

6. In Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, eds. Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987), 78.

7. Geraldine Cousin, Churchill the Playwright (London: Methuen, 1989), 47.

8. Churchill has developed a language of the “Historical Unconscious,” Karl Toepfer argues in “From Imitation to Quotation,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 5.2 (1991): 121–136.

9. Lizbeth Goodman in her study of British feminist theater states that of the 98 groups responding to the Feminist Theatre Survey, 57 used collaborative work and 69 reported using some form of collective devising. She notes that these common working methods are in part the product of financial constraints, since few of such groups could consistently afford to commission scripts, and that “the ways in which these types of working practices intersect with feminist politics in any theatre group varies [sic] significantly, depending upon factors such as group composition and size, and sources and amounts of funding.” Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 88–89.

10. For a detailed description of Fanshen and its impact, see Rob Ritchie, ed., The Joint Stock Book: the making of a theatre collective (London: Methuen, 1987), in particular the reminiscences of David Hare. It is worth noting that actors were not paid during the nine-week “writing gap,” as it was called, and this sometimes meant not only financial difficulties for them, but necessitated their departure from the company before the rest of the production process (rehearsal, revision, and commercial performance) could go forward. Clearly some important details of this collective artistic production had not been worked out.

11. In interview with Emily Mann, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, eds. Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987), 80. Later in the same interview she states that “the only documentary play I've done was a television play about Northern Ireland, about a trial in the Diplock Courts” (81). The apparent contradiction is easily explainable, I think, if one notes that “documentary” applied to Fen seems to be a loose description of a method of composition that took its inspiration from careful observation of a fenland community, but transmuted the raw material into fiction. She makes it clear that none of the characters was intended as a direct portrait of a particular individual—traits, comments, memories, and incidents derived from various people might contribute to one fictional personage; she says that the members of the Joint Stock company who gathered material in the fen village did not use tape recorders and the actors among them would act out impressions of people who had been interviewed. In contrast, The Legion Hall Bombing was created from actual transcripts from the Diplock courts, much condensed to be sure, and thus Churchill labels it her only documentary play—here using the term more strictly. For descriptions of the research methods used in developing Fen, see The Joint Stock Book, especially 150–152; Geraldine Cousin, Churchill the Playwright, 46–48; Cousin's interview with Churchill, “The Common Imagination and the Individual Voice,” New Theatre Quarterly 4.13 (February, 1988): 3–16; and Amelia Howe Kritzer, The Plays of Caryl Churchill (London: Macmillan, 1991), 150–151.