A Revolution for the Stage – Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill

Abstract

The raw material of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest was extracted from the 1989 Revolution in Romania and chiselled to the essence. The play bridges reality and fiction through a cross-cultural perspective, which implies documentation, collaborative work and emotional detachment. The British playwright used innovative devices and adapted pictorial techniques to turn the Romanian Revolution into a work of art, to preserve what she considered particular and also connect the event to several of the cultural symbols Romania is associated with.

Keywords

• british drama
• cross-cultural perspective
• dramatic devices
• reality and fiction