Included in this volume are Caryl Churchill's Vinegar Tom, about witchcraft in the seventeenth century; Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, an account of the lives of four young women by Pam Gems; Louise Page's Tissue, about breast cancer; and Aurora Leigh, adapted by Michelene Wandor herself from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel. Each play has an afterword by its author, and the volume opens with an introduction by the editor.

A play taking place in London during 1979 and in Victorian Africa explores the effects of sexual repression and stereotypes on people's identities.

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." The volume also contains a new introduction by the author as well as short prefaces to each play.

Premiered at the Royal National Theatre, this extraordinary play by one of Britain's leading playwrights combines English folk tales with modern urban life. In terms of its language alone, it is as exciting and challenging on the page as on the stage.
The play follows the Skriker, -a shapeshifter and death portent, ancient and damaged-, in its search for love and revenge as it pursues two young women to London, changing its shape at every new encounter. Along with the Skriker come Rawheadandbloodybones, the Kelpie, the Green Lady, Black Dog and more, till the whole country is swarming...

-Sharp comedy and a serious purpose are splendidly combined in Cloud 9, Caryl Churchill's provocative and amusing study of sexual politics... It unlocks the imagination, liberates the mind, and leaves you weak with laughter.- -Time Out
-Audacious and savagely funny. Mesmerizing.- -Washington Post
Cloud 9 is about relationships - between women and men, men and men, women and women. It is about sex, work, mothers, Africa, power, children, grandmothers, politics, money, Queen Victoria and Sex. Cloud 9 premiered in London at the Royal Court Theatre in...

-Bristles with the intelligence and insight of a major writer.- -Financial Times
-Brilliantly ... evoke s] the mood of a country through snapshot images.- -Guardian
-An act of moral commitment as well as theatrical virtuosity.- -London Sunday Times
Mad Forest explores the reactions of ordinary people to confused events, focusing in particular on two families. What emerges is the dreadful damage done to people's lives by repression and the painful difficulties of lasting change.
Caryl Churchill's play about the Romanian revolution was written after...

-Churchill, who constantly reinvents dramatic form, has come up with something compelling and strange: an intimate revue about the increasing surreality of modern life.- -Guardian
-Puts one in mid of the painter Magritte...Each brief scene is preceded by doomy, tabloid television 'news music', and a graphic announcing some heavy topical subject - The War in Bosnia, for instance, or the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Then the performers... play a scene that has nothing to do with its title...The piece creates a haunting impression of urban alienation, self-obsession and...

Welcome to Wal-Mart. On their break, a cashier and her fellow workers flick through celebrity gossip magazines.
'See you Later, Celine, ' says a headline. What's wrong with Celine? Why is she turning her back on her glamorous public life, her adoring fans? And how is her story connected to the story of an unknown woman on the facing page? It's not. Until the Oracle intervenes.
This wild and slippery fantasy from French-Canadian writer Olivier Choiniere explores our insatiable appetite for private lives made public. In a new translation by Caryl Churchill, Bliss is -a clever,...

Premiered at the Royal National Theatre, this extraordinary new play by one of Britain's leading playwrights combines English folk tales with modern urban life. In terms of its language alone, it is as exciting and challenging on the page as on the stage. The play follows the Skriker, 'a shapeshifter and death portent, ancient and damaged, ' in its search for love and revenge as it pursues two young women to London, changing its shape at every new encounter. Along with the Skriker come Rawheadandbloodybones, the Kelpie, the Green Lady, Black Dog and more, till the whole country is swarming...

Written for Joint Stock, this theatre company's workshop for the play was "sexual politics," thus giving Caryl Churchill the idea for her parallel between colonial and sexual oppression. Act I takes place in Victorian Africa, whilst Act II is set in modern London. Much interplay is made of gender and colour: for example, Clive, the white settler, has a black servant, Joshua, who is played by a white because he wants to be what the whites want him to be. Hilarious and thought-provoking.