Category Archives: Caryl Churchill

Other places: Beckett’s TV work, a “new” Churchill play, Brecht’s Galileo in Stratford-upon-Avon

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Jack McGowran in a BBC production of Samuel Beckett's Eh Joe.

Jack McGowran in a BBC production of Samuel Beckett’s Eh Joe.

From Rhys Tranter of A Piece of Monologue comes a pointer to this essay by Jonathan Bignell about Samuel Beckett‘s television plays. As might be expected, Bignell writes, these were not exactly ratings blockbusters:

The BBC Audience Research Report on Eh Joe shows that 3% of the viewers in the BBC’s audience sample watched the play, and the Reaction Index for the programme (a measure of appreciation) was the low figure of 49. Several viewers liked the use of monologue over silent images, and one viewer wrote “obviously television could be the medium for this sort of thing, and it is a good experiment.”  But many viewers thought the play was very depressing.  A third of the sample said it was dull and dreary, with no visual appeal. …

In Britain there has always been a tension between television’s Public Service responsibility to raise the cultural standards of audiences, and the requirement to entertain. Broadcasts of Beckett’s television work show that the BBC could ignore negative audience responses and small numbers of viewers and present “the best” of arts culture as defined by BBC personnel and an informed reviewing culture in the press. The casting of high-profile theatre actors in Beckett’s television work, and the images of art-works by Bacon and Giacometti in Shades, for example, link Beckett’s plays to a valued European (and not just British) arts culture.

New Caryl Churchill plays only come every few years, so it’s a bit of a surprise to find yet another Churchill world premiere just after last year’s Love and Information at the Royal Court. Ah — a world premiere, yes, but the world premiere of a play written some forty years ago. Her 1972 The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution begins performances at London’s Finborough Theatre on 31 March. Set in Algeria in 1956, the play is described thusly:

A civil servant presents his psychologically disturbed daughter to the hospital for assessment and insists on her admittance. An inspector demands treatment for his helpless violence against his own wife and child. Three in-patient revolutionaries are delusional and paranoid. These products of a broken society are beginning to show symptoms, how should they be treated? The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution is a forensic insight into the adjustment of morality for the sake of conscience.

Bertolt Brecht is busting out all over. We’ve got the disastrously received Clive (an adaptation of Baal) and the rather more highly-regarded Good Person of Szechwan here in New York; now Mark Ravenhill’s adaptation A Life of Galileo is at the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon. (Galileo was born on this day, 15 February, in 1564; don’t forget to send a card.) Michael Billington lauded the show in the Guardian this past Wednesday:

A reactionary pope dies, only to be succeeded by a seeming liberal who soon reverts to institutional conservatism. You could hardly have a more topical play than this. But the real pleasure of Roxana Silbert’s modern-dress RSC revival and Mark Ravenhill’s slimmed-down translation lies in the absolute clarity with which they put Brecht’s masterpiece before us. …  [The] real joy lies in seeing Brecht’s timeless debate about scientific morality rendered with such pellucid swiftness.

Brecht appears to be back, even if he never really left us. And thanks to Mr. Billington or whoever decides these things for the link to my own essay on Life of Galileo from his review.

Below, the trailer for the current RSC production of Life of Galileo for your viewing pleasure:

Costa and Barker uncut

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If Maddy Costa’s interview with Howard Barker in the Guardian the other day seemed a bit brief, and Barker more pugnacious than usual, “The Curious Romance of Howard Barker,” Costa’s expanded version of the interview at her own blog States of Deliquescence, clarifies and explains — and it’s a much more interesting and (I think) accurate picture of the dramatist than that offered by the Guardian‘s version (and also addresses some of the more kneejerk concerns of the commenters there). A few quotes from Costa’s rewrite:

What he does believe in is tragedy, because tragedy disrupts rational thought and teaches its audience nothing. “King Lear doesn’t say anything,” he argues. “It doesn’t say what is a king, or what would be a good king.” Although Galactia, at the end of Scenes, expresses disgust at the idea of being “understood” by her public, Barker says it’s another of his characters, Machinist from Animals in Paradise, who gets closest to expressing his own view — by refusing to express one at all. He sets himself in stark opposition to playwrights who know what they want to communicate: “I write from ignorance. I don’t know what I want to say, and I don’t care if you listen or not. On the other hand, I also think I’m privileging you, because I’m giving you, the audience, the outcome of a lot of anxiety and struggle.” …

Just as the voice in Barker’s plays is uprooted from our own time, so are his subjects. He started his career at the Royal Court, but quickly turned against it. “I knew there was something I didn’t like about the Royal Court: I now understand it was this constant emphasis on the politics. The politics was more important than the art.” He has a similar problem with the National Theatre: “A question you might ask is: what is a national theatre? It seems to me it has to be something: it’s not just a big building that does a lot of plays, because then it could be anything. Presumably it knowingly or unknowingly must reproduce the contemporary political consensus.” Reproduces it, or questions it? “No: it thinks it questions it — but that’s part of the consensus. We’re in a world of what I believe is worryingly called transparency: everything is continually being examined critically. But by producing lots of plays which argue about society, the theatre is merely reproducing the rule of society: it’s not breaking it down.” …

Instead of the outside world, he looks to culture for inspiration for his plays. Lately, he has been concerned with Pontius Pilate’s relationship with his wife and the Velazquez painting Las Meninas. But plays also begin, he says, with the desire to test a hypothesis. “I’m trying to work something out which clearly worries me at some level, so the first question for the artist is a challenge to themselves. ‘Do I really believe that we should love each other?’ Let’s take that as a question, that cliche which now dominates western culture. Jesus made it a rule that you must love everybody. Now ask yourself a basic question: why should I love anybody or everybody? That’s your beginning, the starting point of the hypothesis. Then, for the preservation of your own sanity, you create a dramatic realisation of whether that’s true or not true. From there it seems to me each play leads to the next.”

But if he doesn’t care for his audience’s entertainment, or enlightenment; if he believes in creating stress within his audience, why should anyone watch his work? His answer is typically singular. “If you have a soul — does everybody have a soul? I don’t know — but if you do, then there’s a necessity for it to be exposed to things. Theatre is a safe place to expose it. To be able to leave a theatre feeling you’ve experienced something, is powerful and useful to you. I never think of art having utility, but I think it does in that sense.”

The fuller version of the interview can be found here.

In other Guardian news, Caryl Churchill — who famously does not give interviews, unlike Barker and Bond — is the subject of this “profile by those who know her” today, cobbled together by Mark Lawson.

Other places: The New York Times, Foreman, and Churchill

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A still from Richard Foreman's film "Once Every Day."

A still from Richard Foreman’s film Once Every Day.

Some New Yorkers will gather around their Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure section this weekend to tick off items in the new season preview of upcoming theatre productions, a somewhat dismaying crop this year. Along with the second Broadway revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the last ten years (I suppose they’re going to keep trying until they get it right), there is the usual lineup of Bright Young Things, a few Mamets, Neil LaBute downtown — and of course quirky dysfunctional family dramedies with sidelong glances to our bitter political times. My own copy of the Times will remain relatively unticked. It makes me want to hitch up my pants and do an Adorno on it, but there are better things to do.

Conspicuously absent from the Times listings is the return of Richard Foreman to the Public Theater stage next April with Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance). April is a long time away; for those who can’t wait, the New York Film Festival will unveil Richard’s new feature film, Once Every Day, at the Walter Reade Theatre on 6 October. His first film since 1981′s Strong Medicine, Once Every Day “zeroes in on a group of 25 people acting out a series of semi-ritualistic behavior patterns. But their eccentric impulses are aborted in unpredictable ways with each attempt at action or development,” according to the NYFF’s Web page for the film. More information is available there.

The season has gotten underway in London too, with a few bangs louder than those to be found here. Along with Howard Barker’s Scenes from an Execution at the National, first up are two new plays by Caryl Churchill, Love and Information, which began previews at the Royal Court yesterday prior to a 14 September opening, and Ding Dong the Wicked, a short play scheduled at the Royal Court for October. On the occasion of these premieres, April de Angelis has prepared an essay about Churchill’s entire career for the Guardian today (and I note my gratitude for the link to my own short note on Churchill’s first play, Owners, from the post, whether it was de Angelis or a savvy Guardian sub responsible for it). The Royal Court’s trailer for Love and Information is today’s video:

Upcoming: “Serious Money” and “Monster” from PTP/NYC

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It’s always a pleasure to welcome the annual summer visits of the Potomac Theatre Project to New York. This year, the company will offer Neal Bell’s Monster, an adaptation of the Frankenstein story, and a timely production of Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money, the first directed by Jim Petosa (recently named the new artistic director of Boston’s New Repertory Theatre) and the second by Cheryl Faraone. The plays will run in repertory July 3–29 at the PTP’s usual summer residence, the Atlantic Stage 2 at 330 West 16th Street; more information here, and tickets available here.

Caryl Churchill: Traps (1977)

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Catherine Neilson and Hugh Fraser in the 1977 Royal Court production of Traps. Photo: John Haynes.

First presented at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in January 1977, directed by John Ashford and designed by Terry Jacobs. With Catherine Kessler (Syl), Nigel Terry (Jack), Anthony Milner (Albert), Tim Piggott-Smith (Reg), Hugh Fraser (Del), and Catherine Neilson (Christie). Text in Caryl Churchill: Plays: One. London: Methuen 1985, 69-125.

Churchill’s Mobius strip of a play is set among a group of communards in their 20s and 30s; the only clear relationships, as set forth in the cast list, are that “Jack is Christie’s younger brother, and Reg is her husband.” As the play opens (in one of several beginnings that run through the length of the play), Reg appears in search of his wife, who has fled for safety to the community, an ersatz family, in which Jack lives. These roles are among only a few of the traps of individual identity which the title of the play describes. Although the group has apparently gathered to establish an alternative society to that outside of the one room in which the play occurs, the same dysfunctional dynamics as those in the outside world apply. Albert expresses a paranoia rooted in the very outsider status of the community itself, fearing that he is being followed by the police; the hostile Del has himself fled the community, only to return demanding recompense for minor expenses which they’ve incurred. (As it turns out, he owes money to others in the community as well.)

The constantly changing status of time, place, and character permit Churchill to examine the frailty of an individual life with no perceptible direction. Churchill also undermines the self-perception of the characters as wounded or victimized by themselves, each other, or the world outside; motivation and chronology can turn on a dime, no matter the utopian intention of the community itself. Tender intimacy between Del and Christie turns to verbal and physical abuse in the space of a stage direction. When Christie takes off her shirt at the beginning of act two, her back is bruised; later, when she removes her shirt again, the bruises have disappeared. While Syl and Christie in the second act have a moment of empathy and solidarity, it is not accompanied by any certainty of identity, security, or status:

SYL: Christie, what shall I do?
CHRISTIE: About what?
SYL: Why can’t you help me?
CHRISTIE: I can’t.
SYL: Help me.
CHRISTIE: I can’t. …
SYL: I could emigrate.
CHRISTIE: That gets you nowhere.
SYL: New life. Pursuit of happiness.
CHRISTIE: No.
SYL: This is already a new life.
CHRISTIE: Never knowing what’s going to happen.
SYL: It’s all right, isn’t it?
CHRISTIE: I get frightened. Don’t you?
SYL: Yes.
CHRISTIE: But it’s all right.
SYL: I don’t see why not. …

At the end of the play, the characters join for a communal bath (one at a time, in which they share each other’s bath water) and meal, and “They are increasingly happy so that gradually, each separately, they start to smile. ” This community is presented as a possible alternative to Reg’s desperate isolation, always an isolation in motion through time and space:

When I drove up in the rain looking for Christie I could hardly see the road in front of me. What with crying and the windscreen wipers not working properly. So I could hardly say I knew that road.

They persist in a state of grace which is, as the behavior of each of the characters has demonstrated, quite unearned. But then, this is the very definition of grace.

Traps is only rarely revived. According to the Internet Off-Broadway Database, it was last produced in New York in 1993 at the New York Theatre Workshop; Lisa Peterson’s production won a 1994 Lortel Award for Outstanding Revival.