[Churchill] is probably more popular in London than in N.Y. and—despite her strong political impulses—at times, accents and places apart, she proves more like an American playwright than most British. For her technique is firmly based on that kind of symbolic realism favored by so many American writers.

Where most playwrights produce a form of dramatic portrait, Miss Churchill, and it can be seen in Cloud Nine and Top Girls as well as Fen, is attempting to suggest a landscape with figures. The background to her plays, their descriptions of the specific worlds outside the players, is extremely important.

Never more than in this richly dense Fen, which offers a perfectly straightforward account of a domestic tragedy—the sort of stuff that newspapers as much as dreams are made of—but this story is set against a wonderful psychogeographic picture of the life, times and...