An Analysis of Foucauldian Power and Prison-Society in Caryl Churchill's Softcops

The essence of British political theatre of the 1970s and 1980s might be re-read withregard to its resistance to the ideological discourses of the dominant power—especially those of the Neo-conservatism of Margaret Thatcher. English dramatists,who were under the substantial influence of Foucauldian subversive view on powerand ideology, through dramatizing the historical events, attempted to stand againstthe ideology and idealism of the ruling power. They began to subvert the literaryfigures of the past in an attempt to create a new mentality. Among them, CarylChurchill in her Softcops (1984) dramatised Foucault’s Discipline and Punish(1975) along with the French Revolution in order to depict the hegemony anddomination of bourgeois power from the nineteenth century to the present. Thispaper is an attempt to illustrate Churchill’s anti-Thatcherite policy in the mentionedplay and her coping with the how and why the ruling power substituted its explicitand violent strategies with soft and disciplinary strategies of surveillance for makingobedient subjects to confront and suppress any potential civil objection.