Appropriation of Churchill’s Owners and Top Girls against Capitalism in Lucy Kirkwood’s Tinderbox and NSFW

Year 2025, Volume: 35 Issue: Special Issue, 63 - 74, 05.08.2025

Elvan Karaman Mez

https://doi.org/10.26650/LITERA2024-1484548

Abstract

Caryl Churchill is a distinguished playwright of the twentieth and twenty-first-century English theatre, and with her oeuvre, it is very difficult to describe her with the words she deserves since her contribution by means of the critiques in her plays is of immeasurable importance. One of her junior contemporaries, Lucy Kirkwood, has a similar understanding and practice to Churchill in her works. Both playwrights have an apparent reaction against the capitalist economic system, the patriarchal system and their harmful oppression of people. Churchill has always been an anti-capitalist throughout her career, as it is in Owners, a play written in the early years of her career as a professional playwright, and she emphasizes the significance of socialism for feminism as it is in Top Girls, a milestone for English drama. In her plays Tinderbox and NSFW, which stands for Not Safe for Work, Kirkwood employs appropriation as a technique that leads the audience and readers to make a connection with Churchill’s critical attitude towards capitalism in Owners and Top Girls. She stresses that the same problems emerging from the capitalist system have been continuing for more than fifty years. This study aims to analyze Kirkwood’s Tinderbox and NSFW in terms of her appropriation from Churchill’s aforementioned plays with an analysis of the impacts of capitalism on people in the twenty-first century owing to the increasing effect of the system, which has gained power since the 1970s.

Keywords

Appropriation , capitalist system , consumerism , Caryl Churchill , Lucy Kirkwood

Ethical Statement

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Supporting Institution

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Thanks

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