Although it was obvious from her early radio play The Ants (1962) that Caryl Churchill could write good dialogue, she had difficulty translating that talent to a stage where she would be noticed. Nevertheless, Churchill has been writing plays--for radio, television, and the legitimate theater--since her college years. Churchill was born in London, where she spent the war years. She was educated from 1948 to 1955, at the Trafalgar School in Montreal, Canada. She returned to England and enrolled at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1957, receiving a B.A. degree in English in 1960. It was there that her first plays were produced.

Her father was a cartoonist, but it was only well along in her career that she began to realize the impact of his work on her own. "Cartoons are really so much like plays. An image with somebody saying something. I grew up with his cartoons of the war--of...