Caryl Phillips’s drama: Liminal fiction under construction?

Most of the existing criticism on Caryl Phillips deals with his novels or his essays. His plays, which were for the most part written in the 1980s, have received comparatively little attention. This article argues that Phillips’s dramatic production should be examined closely because it contains in a nutshell some of the themes and characters that recur in his more mature work and therefore form the backbone of his world vision. Such a comparative approach helps to highlight Phillips’s artistic consistency and his ability to give different forms to similar concerns. More specifically, its aim is to show to what extent Phillips’s novel In the Falling Snow (2009) is a liminal text that is in fact built upon the preoccupations at the heart of his early plays, most notably Strange Fruit (1981), Where There Is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983)