Caryl Churchill

Mary Luckhurst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134281923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théâtre britannique

One of Europe's greatest playwrights, Caryl Churchill has been internationally celebrated for four decades. She has exploded the narrow definitions of political theatre to write consistently hard-edged and innovative work. Always unpredictable in her stage experiments, her plays have stretched the relationships between form and content, actor and spectator to their limits.

This new critical introduction to Churchill examines her political agendas, her collaborations with other practitioners, and looks at specific production histories of her plays. Churchill's work continues to have profound resonances with her audiences and this book explores her preoccupation with representing such phenomena as capitalism, genocide, environmental issues, identity, psychiatry and mental illness, parenting, violence and terrorism. It includes new interviews with actors and directors of her work, and gathers together source material from her wide-ranging career.

Part I Life and Politics

DOI: 10.4324/9780203567302-1

1 Contexts

DOI: 10.4324/9780203567302-2

Overview

Frequently described as ‘the first dramatist of the 21st century’¹ and ‘the most consistently innovative playwright of the postwar era’ (Sierz 2011:25), Caryl Churchill is one of the most significant political dramatists in Western theatre. Her professional work reaches back to the 1960s and is significant for its continual demonstration of audacious experiment and its resistance to classification. Deemed ‘unholy in her variability’,² Churchill the artist is renowned for her unpredictable experiments and for her willingness to take risks. Alastair Macaulay declared her ‘the most original playwright in Britain’, and argued that she writes ‘like a visionary, a poet, an absurdist, a politician, a satirist’.³ An intellectual, a radical innovator, and a highly sophisticated formal craftswoman, she has always challenged mainstream cultural assumptions about theatre as an art form and commercial product, and is used to controversy. Her decision, for example, to publish Seven Jewish Children (2009) on the internet and to allow performances on the proviso that donations are collected for a Palestinian charity meant that she was able to effect political action through the very decision to produce her play. Since Seven Jewish Children may be performed by any group of people, anywhere (local censorship laws permitting), she also demolished the division between professional and amateur, and negated the necessity for particular kinds of traditional theatrical venue. In doing so, Churchill threw down the gauntlet to theatrical oligarchies – who found themselves suddenly extraneous to control and commodification. Let there be no doubt – this is an artist who both confounds and provokes.

Churchill’s work shows a lifelong quest for new forms of nonnaturalist political theatre: she cuts across and fuses artistic disciplines, and is as likely to work with musicians, composers, singers, choreographers and dancers as she is with actors and directors. Famously, she works from the premise that ‘anything is possible in theatre’.⁴ As she has said:

I do enjoy the form of things. I enjoy finding a form that seems best to fit what I’m thinking about […] I enjoy plays that are non-naturalistic and don’t move at real time.

(Kay 1989: 42)

Although long associated with the Royal Court Theatre, she is not in the dominant realist tradition that the Court has marketed hard. Churchill belongs to the same generation of playwrights as David Hare, Howard Brenton, David Edgar, Pam Gems and Trevor Griffiths, and it is the influences of pre-World War II surrealism and the post-war politics of absurdist drama (especially Eugène Ionesco) as well as the minimalism and gestural theatre of Samuel Beckett that continue to stand out in her work – from the early, chilling radio plays of the 1960s to later theatre works such as Vinegar Tom, Fen, The Skriker, Mad Forest, Blue Heart, Dream Play and Far Away. Reading or performing her work demands a facility to make sometimes fantastical leaps of imagination, and meaning is often layered. Who can forget the nightmarish gibberish of The Skriker and her murderous appetites? Who can forget the scene between the vampire and the painfully submissive, self-destructive dog in Mad Forest? Who does not shiver at the stuttering form of Blue Heart, which threatens to implode into the violent unspeakability of its incest narrative (notwithstanding the entrance of a ten-foot tall bird)? And yet the surrealism is presented in a down-to-earth fashion; it is woven into the fabric of the everyday with no self-consciousness. Internal and external worlds, the quotidian and the gothic, past and present are all in continual collision in Churchill’s plays, and suggested by visual and sonic landscapes that often have echoes of a version of theatrical magic realism.

Churchill’s more recent preoccupations reflect the new definitions of post-Thatcherite British political theatre offered by Amelia Howe Kritzer in a country where current political life ‘is characterised by public disengagement and detachment’ but theatre culture is still thriving, and arguably ‘of renewed strength,’ as playwrights dissect the individual’s relationship to structures of power – whether the power of collectives, global organisations, technology, religions, nations, the media, knowledge flow or ethical codes (Kritzer 2008: 26, 221). Kritzer groups Churchill both with an older generation of political playwrights such as David Hare, David Edgar and Howard Brenton, and with later generations that include Tanika Gupta, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Sarah Kane, Gregory Burke and Simon Stephens (Kritzer 2008). The thematic agendas of Churchill’s plays repeatedly address war, genocide, imperialism, capitalism and the global economy, environmental atrocity, sexuality, scientific knowledge, patriarchy, motherhood and the politics of reproduction, cruelty and violence, and parenting and child abuse. Her dramas mirror contemporary international preoccupations and offer an embedded scrutiny of the individual’s relationship to the ideologies inherent within specific social and institutional structures. Western models of the family are often represented as a microcosm of economic and political environments, which are invariably darkly catastrophic. Home is not a safe place. It is a site of gothic collapse and psychic mayhem.

My own fascination with Churchill has come from my Brechtian training and commitment to a political theatre that is also poetic. I admire the ways in which Churchill has taken certain devices deployed by Brecht and advanced them further than he could have imagined. Churchill thrives on rehearsal processes, holds a lifelong admiration for actors, and has confessed to a susceptibility to ‘falling in love with performers, with what I see them do to my plays’.⁵ Her varied working processes and collaborations constitute important challenges to how we understand a theatrical event, what it might look like, how it might sound and where it takes place. My intrigue ensues from the plays I have directed and the many students I have taught, as well as a ghoulish interest in representing the apocalyptic. Churchill’s work is a sustained exploration of the politics and operations of complicity, and although few remark on it, it shows an urgent engagement with the human rights of women and children. While it is unusual for academics to comment on the terrifying suggestibility of Churchill’s landscapes, actors and directors know of the darkness and destruction her work confronts. Actress Kathryn Hunter has spoken of inhabiting the Skriker, a part she felt was both compelling and cataclysmic, involving ‘about thirteen different characters’ and more to do with ‘basic drives than psychological characterisations’ (Oddey 2005: 177).

Churchill’s worlds are the stuff of nightmare, of primal, post-Freudian horror, where children know no safety. Parents and stepparents consistently fail to nurture and protect; indeed, they abandon, torture, abuse, groom and openly threaten to kill their progeny. Often children have no voice in Churchill’s plays – they are the ghosts occupying a strange no man’s land, like the ragged, barefooted boy in Fen; the mostly offstage Susy in Blue Heart, whose impending but endlessly deferred arrival suggests the unspeakable trauma of a dreadful family secret. They cannot speak or are denied speech because they are the purveyors of a truth that cannot be named – like Francoise in The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution, who is mentally scarred by the knowledge of her parents’ complicity in the colonial regime; Angie in Top Girls faces a destitute future because she is failed by both carers and state welfare systems; in A Number, a psychopathic father reveals his delusional ‘mercy’ to the son whom he decided not to murder: ‘I could have killed you and I didn’t […] I spared you though you were this disgusting thing’ (Plays 1 1985: 197). In Fen, Churchill portrays the physical abuse of a child by her stepmother – one of the few contemporary onstage scenes of a child being tortured (Plays 2 1990: 153–54). Adult family members condemn their children to a violent future, and become bedtime propagandists and warmongers. There’s nothing cosy about Churchill, just as there’s nothing cuddly about Alfred Hitchcock, Roald Dahl, David Lynch or Tim Burton. Like the transformation of people into symbolic Nazis in Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, Churchill’s nightmares are all the more chilling because they are based on political realities.

Anonymity and privacy

Born in 1938, Churchill has carefully eschewed the interface with the media and critical establishments sought by playwrights such as Harold Pinter and David Hare. Few official photographs are in circulation because Churchill prefers her reputation to rest on her work. This preference for media anonymity, in addition to the chameleonic nature of her writing career, has had an interesting impact on her reception history. The majority of academics have privileged a history of male playwrights over female in twentieth-century British theatre history, which standard academic texts reflect (see, for example, Shellard 1999; Eyre and Wright 2000; Innes 2002).

During her career she has given only limited interviews, mainly to women, and since the 1980s has not added to the sketchy details about her upbringing that she revealed early on. In the past decade, public appearances and platform events in Britain have been a rarity, and Max Stafford-Clark, a lifelong professional friend of Churchill’s, has described her as ‘notoriously reluctant to write or talk about her own writing’ (Roberts and Stafford-Clark 2007: 88). In 2012 her long-time publisher, Nick Hern, revealed that she once implied that public self-analysis might disrupt her creativity: ‘I really don’t like talking about my work. It makes me self-conscious when I come to write the next thing.’⁶ Like Beckett she is ‘very wary’ of labels (Itzin 1980: 279) and is positively uninterested in cultures of celebrity, once telling the hapless American critic Mel Gussow: ‘I want to be either Homer or Anon, one of those people no one says anything about.’ In the same meeting, Churchill helpfully suggested that Gussow fashion his article around her dislike of interviews, which he duly did.⁷

A writer of brilliant precision, Churchill is also exasperated by the reductiveness of descriptive vocabularies (Fitzsimmons 1989: 91). Critical terms have been attached to her that have suggested that her work is fixed and transparent, as if Churchill as writer, theatre-maker and intellectual does not evolve. In fact, she is a constant inventor and reinventor, or – to use Dominic Dromgoole’s more sensational phrasing – ‘a category smasher’ (Dromgoole 2000: 52). She has been a keen reader of psychological and psychiatric discourses (among others), but since her early career has been quiet about her personal development. The details of her own life have been worked less overtly into her plays than many other writers and her artistic leanings are towards provocation. Churchill reacted anti-pathetically to the autobiographical writing embraced by female novelists of her generation in the 1960s and 1970s: ‘That seemed to be something I definitely didn’t want to do. I wanted to make something more distanced’ (Cousin 1988: 5). While Churchill has displayed a linguistic range that includes hyper-real dialogue, voices from different historic periods, satiric verse, song lyrics, Joycean streams of consciousness and punning, as well as the evocatively poetic, she is also famously spare with her dialogue, many of her works indicating a profound fascination with the limitation of words and the eloquence of silence. The caution she exudes when trying to describe her creative processes is apparent to anyone who follows her appearances. If she wishes to make a political statement in public, she is more likely to do it through a letter to The Guardian. While her plays are profoundly engaged with anti-capitalist and anti-globalist agendas, Churchill herself has rarely sought the speaker’s podium. In this book I make no apology for arguing that Churchill is one of the most significant political playwrights of our time.

Childhood and parental influence

Intensely private, Churchill has said little about her upbringing and there are few interview sources. An only child, she spent most of the first ten years of her life in London and, although a very young infant during World War II, she was evidently imbued with an alertness to the international political arena through her father’s art. Robert Churchill was a cartoonist by profession and Churchill has recalled how ‘I grew up with his cartoons of the war – of Goebbels and Mussolini’, and explained how she came to understand that there was a link between her own career and her father’s: ‘Cartoons are really so much like plays. An image with somebody saying something’ (Thurman 1982: 53). In political cartoons, word and image are often juxtaposed to create an explosive contextual clash. Such effects are apparent in many of Churchill’s plays, and she has explicitly talked of a world of the grotesque borrowed from cartoon art, and the analogy between cartoons and her satiric caricatures, for example – of city financiers in Serious Money.⁸

From 1948 to 1955 the family was located in Montreal, Canada, where Churchill continued her schooling. Churchill has said little about her early creative life: only that she wrote short stories and poems, performed playlets for her parents, made up performances with friends, and spent one summer painting theatre sets when she was 15. She also developed an interest in going to see plays. (Cousin 1988: 3; Thurman 1982: 54). Churchill’s mother left school at 14, worked as a secretary, and then became a fashion model, notably appearing in an advertisement for the well-known bedtime drink company Ovaltine, and landed a few ‘bit parts in films’ (Thurman 1982: 54). The little that Churchill has said indicates that she was intrigued by the transgressiveness of he...