''Owners'' is a 1972 play by British playwright
Caryl Churchill.
It was first performed at the
Royal Court Theatre
The Royal Court Theatre, at different times known as the Court Theatre, the New Chelsea Theatre, and the Belgravia Theatre, is a non-commercial West End theatre in Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England ...
's
Theatre Upstairs in a production directed by
Nicholas Wright.
The play is a satire of
property rights
The right to property, or the right to own property (cf. ownership) is often classified as a human right for natural persons regarding their possessions. A general recognition of a right to private property is found more rarely and is typically h ...
about
real estate
Real estate is property consisting of land and the buildings on it, along with its natural resources such as crops, minerals or water; immovable property of this nature; an interest vested in this (also) an item of real property, (more general ...
and of the people who own real estate and those who live in
rented accommodation.
''Owners'' was Churchill's first professionally produced stage play, and she has described the play as a turning-point in her career as a dramatist: "Since ''Owners'' I've worked almost entirely in the theatre. So my working life feels divided quite sharply into before and after 1972, and ''Owners'' was the first play of the second part."
[
In '']New Haven Register
The ''New Haven Register'' is a daily newspaper published in New Haven, Connecticut. It is owned by Hearst Communications. The Register's main office is located at 100 Gando Drive in New Haven. The ''Register'' was established about 1812 and ...
'', E. Kyle Minor described ''Owners'' as an "intermittently interesting and otherwise tedious" work that was written before Churchill had become a genius of theater. Sylviane Gold of ''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' stated that "she had yet to achieve the formal mastery that would make later plays like “ Cloud Nine” and “Top Girls
''Top Girls'' is a 1982 play by Caryl Churchill. It centres around Marlene, a career-driven woman who is heavily invested in women's success in business. The play examines the roles available to women in old society, and what it means or takes fo ...
” instant modernist classics", but argued that Churchill's "acidic critique of capitalist freebooters and the culture that worships them as heroes carries even more resonance today than it did in 1972".
References
1972 plays
Plays by Caryl Churchill
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