Churchill Plays: 1: Owners; Traps; Vinegar Tom; Light Shining in Buckinghamshire; Cloud Nine

Formerly part of the "World Dramatists" series of play collections by classic and modern playwrights, including foreign works in workable and accurate translations, this title and seven others are reissued in a new format under the heading, "World Classics".

In Traps, a set of characters meet themselves and their pasts to create "plenty of sinewy lines and joyous juxtapostions" Plays and PlayersVinegar 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…" TribuneLight 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 GuardianCloud 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." GuardianOwners:"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.

Caryl Churchill is "a dramatist who must surely be rated among the half-dozen best now writing." New Statesman Owners: "Starkly relevant." Guardian Traps: "Churchill's most confident and creative deployment of stagecraft to date." Plays and Players Vinegar Tom: "Speaks, through its striking images and its plethora of ironic contradictions, of and to this century's still deep-rooted anti-feminism." Tribune Light Shining in Buckinghamshire: "One of the finest pieces of English playwriting for years." Plays and Players Cloud Nine: "Compassionate, witty, and economic." Financial Times.