The Theatre of Caryl Churchill

R. Darren Gobert

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781408154533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Playwriting

The Theatre of Caryl Churchill documents and analyses the major plays and productions of one of Britain's greatest and most innovative playwrights. Drawing on hundreds of never-before-seen archival sources from the US and the UK, it provides an essential guide to Churchill's groundbreaking work for students and theatregoers. Each chapter illuminates connections across plays and explores major scripts alongside unpublished and unfinished projects. Each considers the rehearsal room, the stage, and the printed text. Each demonstrates how Churchill has pushed the boundaries of dramatic aesthetics while posing urgent political and theoretical questions. But since each maps Churchill's work in a different way, each deploys a different reading practice - for many approaches are necessary to characterise such a restlessly imaginative and prolific career. Through its five interlocking parts, The Theatre of Caryl Churchill tells a story about the playwright, her work, and its place in contemporary drama.

CHAPTER 1

CHURCHILL’S LANDSCAPES

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Caryl Churchill once told a journalist that ‘[p]erhaps I feel the same about theatrical form as an artist feels about paint’.¹ Her analogy explains much. In Vinegar Tom, the bold presentational style reveals the play’s means of production just as the impasto of the abstract expressionist does. In Fen, the vivid scenes and characters shade into one another without visible demarcations, as in Renaissance sfumato. And in her 2012 play Love and Information, sharply drawn dots – the shortest of the sixty-nine scenes is two words long – collectively constitute an epic canvas that exceeds the sum of its pointillist parts. Churchill’s analogy figures her medium as a fluid vehicle for unbound expression rather than an agglomerate of genres and conventions: in other words, if theatre is paint, she does what she wants with it. It is therefore apt that Sarah Daniels once called her fellow playwright the Picasso of their craft.² The scope of Churchill’s techniques has cemented her reputation as the most restless and innovative playwright now working, ever reinventing her style and pioneering new forms. And these forms uncannily match her content, which has evolved in tandem with history: from the threat of nuclear annihilation (in her first published play, The Ants) through the collapse of communism (Mad Forest) or from the sexual revolution (Cloud Nine) to the new biotechnological revolution (A Number). As she once told another journalist, ‘I don’t set out to find a bizarre way of writing.… I enjoy finding the form that seems to best fit what I’m thinking about’.³ Thus Churchill echoes August Strindberg, whose experiments in drama emerged precisely alongside his experiments with painting, and whom Churchill honoured with her adaptation of the expressionist A Dream Play in 2005. Equally restless and innovative, Strindberg sought to design new dramatic shapes after bemoaning that ‘we have not yet found the new form for the new content, and the new wine has burst the old bottles’.⁴ In this chapter, I scrutinise three of Churchill’s most radical forms, illuminating how each manages to contain its dramatic content.

Top Girls

Churchill’s best known and most-produced play, Top Girls, had a long gestation. Gillian Hanna of the now-defunct feminist theatre collective Monstrous Regiment remembers early discussions between the company and the playwright about a project that would bring together women from different historical periods, including Joan, the legendary pope from the early Middle Ages, and Isabella Bird, the celebrated Victorian explorer.⁵ Churchill herself told an interviewer that her preparatory work on Dull Gret, the figure from Flemish folklore famously painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, began as early as 1977 or 1978.⁶ And records from London’s Royal Court Theatre show that she was working on a play provisionally called Famous Women by 1979.⁷ The juggernaut of Cloud Nine – the play that established Churchill’s international fame and brought her first commercial success – had presumably consumed much of that year and the next, during which time she deepened her experiments in overlapping dialogue by writing Three More Sleepless Nights, premiered at Soho Poly on 9 June 1980. But she continued work on Top Girls, too, completing a full draft by March 1981. She sent it to Max Stafford-Clark, the director of Cloud Nine and Light Shining in Buckinghamshire before it and by then the Artistic Director of the Royal Court, asking in a letter whether he saw possibility in the project despite its unconventional manoeuvres. He did, and Churchill continued to refine the play even as she began preparations for Fen (whose inaugural meeting with director Les Waters took place on 13 December 1981⁸) and as she finished Crimes, a teleplay for the BBC. A second draft of Top Girls was completed by March 1982 and became Stafford-Clark’s primary focus by late May.

Top Girls tells the story of Marlene, a businesswoman in early 1980s London whose success at the titular employment agency depends not only on her intelligence and ruthlessness but also on the working-class sister who has raised Marlene’s child as her own. The play dramatises Marlene’s bitter fight with this sister, Joyce; her awkward relationship with the disowned daughter, Angie; and her interactions with her work colleagues, Nell and Win, each, like Marlene, a ‘high-flying lady’.⁹ Marlene has been promoted to managing director over a sexist (and unseen) rival, Howard Kidd, whose wife will accuse her of being ‘not natural’ and ‘one of these ballbreakers’.¹⁰ And we see her celebrate this promotion at a surreal dinner party attended by exceptional women drawn from history (such as Isabella Bird or Lady Nijo, the thirteenth-century concubine turned nun and memoirist) or from legend (such as Dull Gret, Pope Joan, or Griselda, the absurdly docile wife celebrated in Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer). ‘We’ve all come a long way’, Marlene toasts, setting her accomplishments alongside theirs: ‘To our courage and the way we changed our lives and our extraordinary achievements’.¹¹ While most plays respect theatrical tradition by revealing their plots in chronologically ordered scenes, Top Girls borrows a device more common to fiction: it reveals its chronological story (its fabula, in the terms of narrative theory) in a non-consecutive arrangement of prolepses and analepses (its sjuzhet). So the play begins with its dinner party on a Saturday night, before moving ahead to Monday at Top Girls; it then retreats to Joyce’s backyard the preceding Sunday and advances again to Monday at the agency. Finally, the play shifts to a year earlier to represent a fraught Sunday-evening visit between the play’s sisters.

In chronological order, in other words, the plot begins with Marlene’s arrival for this unexpected visit and her dispensing of presents: chocolates and a dress for Angie, perfume for Joyce. (‘There’s no danger I’d have it already, that’s one thing’, she responds, dismissing the gift as a bourgeois luxury unknown to her.¹²) And the plot ends after Marlene’s promotion and at the office, to which Angie makes her own unexpected visit and where her biological mother assesses her as dispassionately as she would a Top Girls job-seeker. ‘She’s a bit thick. She’s a bit funny…. She’s not going to make it’, she tells Win.¹³ The fabula gives Marlene the final speech and leaves her on the precipice of greater success – not unlike Margaret Thatcher, whom she worships and whose second electoral victory would come some months after the play’s premiere. But the sjuzhet of Top Girls instead begins with its surreal dinner party, immediately signalling the play’s fractured temporality by bringing its subjects impossibly together. And it ends with Angie’s somnambulant prophecy about a future in which top girls like Marlene and Thatcher continue to be rewarded: ‘Frightening’.¹⁴ By reordering its plot, the play gives Angie the last word over Marlene who, in contrast to her ebullience in the opening scene, is left tired, drunk, and upset over the confrontation with Joyce that comprises the play’s final act.

Ordering her plot as she does, Churchill trains attention on this confrontation, which despite Churchill’s disclaimer that ‘the argument is a drunken one between two angry sisters, not a considered political assessment’ nonetheless pitches diametrically opposed politics against one another.¹⁵ In one corner stands Marlene, blind to any interest but her own and certain that ‘equality’ means only her own ability to compete on equal terms. Thus she resembles Thatcher herself, whose apparent pioneering as the first female Prime Minister of Britain belied more ignominious achievements, such as reversing upwards trends in social mobility.¹⁶ When Marlene snorts that ‘I don’t believe in class’ and ‘I believe in the individual’, she espouses a philosophy in which ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women’, as Thatcher notoriously put it.¹⁷ At the same time, Marlene unmasks her confused logic when she professes to hate a working class which, she simultaneously asserts, ‘doesn’t exist’.¹⁸ As the incoming director of an employment agency – a pointedly chosen profession – she betrays no sense that individual success relies on collective support, however certain her conviction that ‘the eighties are going to be stupendous…. For me’.¹⁹ And thus she recalls Thatcher’s tone-deaf remark that ‘a first class nanny-housekeeper’ is essential to a woman’s achievement, made as she presided over an exclusively male Cabinet and the most male-dominated Parliament in decades.²⁰ Churchill slyly registers such egocentrism when the Prime Minister is paid Marlene’s ultimate compliment: ‘She’s a tough lady, Maggie. I’d give her a job’.²¹

In the other corner stands Joyce, hidebound by a crude leftism whose political interventions are reduced to scratching or spitting on the occasional Mercedes or Rolls Royce. Joyce is deaf to Marlene’s complaints about their mother’s life, made more awful by a drunken and abusive husband whose putatively committed socialism stopped somewhere short of home. And Joyce’s reflexive contempt for the middle class – foreshadowed in her ungracious response to Marlene’s perfume – runs through the scene, as when Marlene enquires about the estuary near their childhood home, with its mud and lapwings. ‘You get strangers walking there on a Sunday’, Joyce concedes. ‘I expect they’re looking at the mud and the lapwings, yes’.²² As the exchange attests, Top Girls contains some of the best naturalistic dialogue of Churchill’s career, sensitive not only to the fault-lines of class and the power dynamics they shift but also to the subtextual cover under which most arguments brew. When Angie reveals that a neighbour has killed his wife, for instance, Joyce declares him a ‘[s]tuck up git’.²³ And by coupling Mr Connolly’s homicide with his class pretensions, she passive-aggressively indicts her sister. But she delays an upfront attack until her interlocutor has praised Thatcher, after which Joyce’s epithet ‘filthy bastards’ can rhetorically subsume Mr Connolly and Marlene, too.²⁴ Perhaps because Joyce’s politics are closer than Marlene’s to Churchill’s, critics have been reluctant to recognise that ‘Joyce’s repetition of leftist truisms is not all that different from Marlene’s continual invocation of right-wing rhetoric’, in the words of Janet E. Gardner, a welcome exception to this reluctance.²⁵ These critics acknowledge Joyce’s sacrifice in raising Marlene’s child, which worsens her privation and precipitates her miscarriage and consequent barrenness. But they have been slower to see Joyce as a suspect mother who casually calls Angie ‘stupid’ and ‘a big lump’ and reacts disproportionately to the girl’s refusal to come in from the garden: ‘Fucking rotten little cunt. You can stay there and die’.²⁶

Far from using Joyce to ‘embod[y] the socialist feminist response to Marlene’s bourgeois feminist stance’ (as one critic asserts),²⁷ Churchill pitches Joyce and Marlene in an insoluble opposition that mimics Thatcher’s intransigence and the uncompromising leftist positions that helped cement her first majority victory in 1979. Class exploitation has of course facilitated Marlene’s ascent on the corporate ladder: she uses not only her sister, who provides unpaid childrearing, but also the typists, clerks, and secretaries whose own typically female and non-unionised labour she sells to corporate clients. But Joyce – whose views Marlene may justifiably see as parroting their father’s – stops short of this insight about the entanglement of class and gender, and she, like her sister, prefers a crude class warfare she expresses as hatred for the women whose houses she cleans: ‘the cows I work for and their dirty dishes with blanquette of fucking veau’.²⁸ Her unsisterly stance is Manichean, as an exchange with Marlene makes clear:

Joyce … nothing’s changed and it won’t with them in.

Marlene Them, them. / Us and them?

Joyce And you’re one of them.

Marlene And you’re us, wonderful us, and Angie’s us / and Mum and Dad’s us.

Joyce Yes, that’s right, and you’re them.²⁹

Joyce shares Marlene’s view of exploiters and exploited locked in...