About the Play:

Fen has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.

Fen is a full-length drama by Caryl Churchill. A moving portrait of the lives and dreams of a group of low-paid women farm workers in England's fen country who perform the most primitive kind of rural labor (potato-picking, onion-grading) for corporate agribusiness. Val wants more. Becky wants to be a hairdresser. Angela wants to escape. Shirley prides herself on keeping going. Doubly constricted by sex and class, Fen is a glimpse at the ways a group of people cope with poverty, grief and the hope of a better life.

Fen is a love story, a ghost story, a story of the impact of multi-national agri-business on the local people of the English fens, a flat and water-logged rural area less than 100 miles north of London. Their fierce ancestors still haunt the land, while the women labour as low-wage farm workers in rock-strewn potato fields for the profit of foreign conglomerates. The play looks at their complex relationships with each other, their work situation and their private lives and dreams, as well as the conflicts within themselves. In particular, we follow the story of Val, who leaves her husband and children to live with a farm worker, Frank. Other characters include Angela, the outsider who torments her stepdaughter Becky; Alice, who has turned to religion; Nell, who tries to assert her rights against the farmer; Shirley, who can't be doing with all the fuss everyone is making. In a world where roles are fixed and choices are few, Fen follows the interweaving lives of different generations of women, and questions our sense of entitlement as to what life should give us.

Fen premiered in 1983 at the University of Essex Theatre, transferred to the Almeida Theatre in London and won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize honouring the best English-language women writers worldwide. Since then the play has been performed on tour in the UK, at The Public Theater in New York, and in regional, fringe festival, and college theatre productions.

Cast: 6 female, 1 male

What people say:

"Ms. Churchill has put together with grace and anger and a generous humor an evening almost entirely composed of wants." — The Sunday New York Times

"...the playwright pins down her poetic subject matter in dialogue of impressive vigour and economy." — Financial Times

"A wonderful and strange play; passionate, tense, and eloquent." — Village Voice

"Ms. Churchill...possesses one of the boldest theatrical imaginations to emerge in this decade who is amazingly enough plowing new ground in the theater with every new play." — The New York Times

About the Author:

Caryl Churchill is widely recognized as one of the UK's leading playwrights. She was born in London and after the Second World War her family emigrated to Montreal in Canada. She returned to England to attend Oxford University and graduated with a degree in English Literature. One of the most respected dramatists in the English-speaking world, she is an internationally known playwright whose work has been given major international theatrical awards throughout the world.