SOURCE: Mitchell, Tony. “Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest: Polyphonic Representations of Southeastern Europe.”¹ Modern Drama 36, no. 4 (December 1993): 499–511.

In the following essay, Mitchell argues that the multi-character perspectives in Mad Forest enable Churchill to manifest the emotional and political undercurrents, distrust in a postcolonial society, and a well-rounded picture of working- and middle-class Romanians before, during, and after the Revolution of 1989.

Caryl Churchill has often been designated a socialist feminist in her work as a playwright, and associated with a theoretical perspective which, in Michelene Wandor's words, “aims to analyse and understand the way in which power relations based on class interact with power relations based on gender.”² Her dramaturgical approach to themes involving women and patriarchy has been distinctively different from that of many of her male peers of socialist persuasion in the British theatre of the past two decades. She uses fragmented, open-ended dramatic structures, and an approach...