The drama survives despite every effort of the playwright to destroy it. When one of the characters finally reveals his heart’s desire, the play ends. Each time, the scene resets, picks itself up, and lines and gestures are repeated until another brutal or hilarious sabotage. At one point, masked gunmen come in and mow down the characters, then a giant yellow bird enters, then a horde of small children. “My main intention was their destruction.” Sure enough, Heart’s Desire starts naturalistically, and within moments is hijacked and repeatedly sabotaged by the playwright. Churchill doesn’t give interviews but she does write very helpful introductions. The first, Heart’s Desire, is about a family waiting for their daughter the second, Blue Kettle, is about a son searching for his mother. This Is a Chair shows a real humility about the political inadequacy of playwrights. I have always associated Churchill with political integrity and courage. It’s a strangely disturbing scene and is reprised under another portentous banner: The Northern Ireland Peace Process. The scene Pornography and Censorship is 10 lines long a mother and father try to get their daughter Muriel to eat her dinner. The action of the scenes has nothing to do with their titles. In This Is a Chair, the scenes all have ponderous titles such as The War in Bosnia or The Labour Party’s Slide to the Right. In the mid-90s, Churchill’s restless questioning of form, story and the political responsibility of the playwright led her to write three plays that attack themselves. Like all her work, it left me asking the question: “Who are we?” A play in which hope comes in the form of human kindness. Light Shining is such a good play about the British, about democracy a play about being on the losing side, about disillusionment a play in which time passes, regimes change and ideals crumble into experience. It’s hard to write an epic about a nation in your garret (I have tried it). Such a way of working creates ensemble plays, plays about society. Several of Churchill’s big plays of the 70s and 80s, including her English civil war epic Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, were written in a collaborative process with actors and a director. It was eminently theatrical.Ĭhurchill at rehearsals for The Skriker. Her work offered fantastic opportunities for nascent actors, directors and designers. One thing I knew for sure: my contemporaries and I kept watching and doing them. Perhaps this is why her plays are standing the test of time. Her work forced questions: if Top Girls was a feminist play, why were most of the women in it so unsympathetic? Why didn’t her plays follow the traditional hero journey like other dramas did? She was provoking and stimulating, never reductive, and she never patronised her audience. Her conclusions aren’t obvious, the issues never simplified. She wrote songs, huge speeches, rhyming couplets, scenes about having periods! She was playful with gender.Ĭhurchill’s work carries urgent themes – with restraint. I appreciated immediately Churchill’s use of history to explore the present, and the way she used humour and music to take you into the darkness. Top Girls, Vinegar Tom, Cloud Nine and Serious Money – all studied or seen in various student productions. I first became familiar with Churchill’s plays when I was a student in the 1980s.
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