This chapter looks the innovations and inspirations of Caryl Churchill. I consider plays from 1970s to 2016, and her involvement with the Royal Court Theatre. I explore ways she has experimented with stylistics and language, moving between naturalism, fantasy and verse to change conceptions of what is a play and what it can do. The chapter involves close reading of three plays: Top Girls (1982) Far Away (2000) and Escaped Alone (2016) to consider ways in which her plays deal with opposing forces of authoritarian, rational and repressive power structures with the non-rational, playful and fantastical and discusses her influence on a new generation of experimental women playwrights. In the discussion of Top Girls, I consider the visceral experiential aspects of this play about the limits of sisterhood in relation to patriarchy and the rise of Mrs Thatcher. I show how Churchill resists a cathartic climax associated with the objectifying male gaze, letting us draw our own conclusions. In Faraway, I consider the influence of Blasted by Sarah Kane. In her play, Churchill uses experimental and experiential structures to reveal links between the unsafety of a child in a domestic scene, capitalist corruption and global ecocide, in just 26 pages. In my analysis of Escaped Alone I show Churchill’s enduring commitment to putting the stories and relationship between women centre stage, the pleasures women take in each other’s company. Innovation comes with a direct separate address by Mrs Jarrett in which various global catastrophes are described. Once again, the play is experiential and evades clear answers. Finally I review writers such as Winsome Pinnock, Lucy Kirkwood and Moira Buffini, who have credited Churchill as a founding influence, discussing the protean imagination of a writer who resists simple domestic interiors for bold experimentation, ‘to elicit an urgently needed political sensing that the world might be otherwise.’ (Elaine Aston)