A rare chance to sample the work of a genius of the stage
A director, a writer and an actor sing the praises of Caryl Churchill ahead of a Glasgow double bill
CARYL Churchill plays don’t get done often in Scotland. The last mainstage production of the work of the 74-year-old iconoclast of British theatre was in 2004, when the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow presented her 1982 look at women in society, Top Girls. That production starred This Life’s Daniela Nardini as a hard-nosed career woman who finds herself at the dinner table with some of the most iconic women in history. Before that we’d have to go back to 1997, when Max Stafford Clark’s Out of Joint company, with whom Churchill has frequently worked, premiered Blue Heart at the Traverse as part of the theatre’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe season.
It’s a welcome surprise then, to find the Citz reviving two of Churchill’s shorter works on the main stage in a slot last year occupied by a Samuel Beckett double bill. Far Away and Seagulls may not be quite as elliptical as the two Becketts, but in terms of Churchill’s audacious use of form, and in the hands of Citizens artistic director Dominic Hill, they should prove equally captivating.
Far Away dates from 2000, and is set in a dystopian futurescape in which the whole world is at war. As a little girl grows into womanhood, the sheer scale of the ongoing annihilation gradually becomes frighteningly clear. Seagulls was written in 1978, and is about what happens to a woman who is able to move things with her mind when that mind starts to fade.
“They’re wonderful to work on,” says Hill. “When you’ve got writing that’s so specific and clean, it’s really rewarding picking them apart and keeping them exact and sharp. What’s great about Far Away is you’ve got a writer writing predominately within what one thinks of as a naturalistic genre, but which is actually metaphorical and ultimately quite surreal in what it describes, but which also feels very modern.
“I’m very drawn to writers that go beyond the kitchen-sink. It’s highly theatrical, but it’s also very political, and deals very much with the world we’re living in now. Seagulls was written 25 years ago, but it feels very current. It’s about celebrity and talent, and what can happen to talent when it’s misused or abused or thrust into the spotlight. While it’s still very much a product of its time in terms of gender politics, it also feels very modern.
“They’re both small plays with big themes. There’s a moment in Far Away in particular that’s very big.”
After her early plays were
She is like a great banner waving to the rest of us, saying let theatre take you to places we haven’t dreamed of yet
produced on television and radio in the 1960s, Churchill first came to prominence in the 1970s, when she became resident dramatist at the Royal Court. This led to working with Stafford-Clark and his Joint Stock company and feminist collective Monstrous Regiment. Churchill’s first play to gain wider acclaim was Cloud Nine, a farce about sexual politics which arrived in 1979, a year after Seagulls.
Although fiercely political, her penchant for experimentation meant Churchill’s work had never been didactic. Even so, arriving in the midst of Margaret Thatcher’s first term of office as Prime Minister, the parallels in Top Girls were plain to see.
“Just putting eight or nine women onstage at the same time is very unusual in itself,” Daniela Nardini says of appearing in the 2004 revival of the play. “But it was almost like being involved in a song, the way she writes. There were never really any pauses. She’d use a slash as punctuation, so as soon as one person stopped speaking, another one would come in immediately, so it needed orchestrating.
“I found the whole experience fascinating”
Churchill’s focus on women hasn’t met with universal approval, as Nardini remembers of some of the reactions to Top Girls. “Sometimes I feel, and I could be wrong, that a lot of the criticisms of the play I detected from audiences came from men. Maybe that’s because Top Girls was so dominated by women, or maybe it’s because she’s a writer who speaks more to women.”
Whatever the answer, Churchill isn’t saying. Over a 50year writing career, she has kept firmly off the publicity treadmill. Despite this, her influence on the generations of playwrights who grew up in her wake remains unquestionable. Author Mark Ravenhill recently curated a season of contemporary classic plays for BBC Radio 3 which was spearheaded by Churchill’s 1976 piece, Light Shining In Buckinghamshire.
Such acknowledgements of Churchill’s status as a pioneer aren’t new, as a series of performed readings of her back catalogue at the Royal Court Theatre made clear in 2008, in celebration of her 70th birthday.
A reading of Far Away was directed by playwright Martin Crimp and the cast included Benedict Cumberbatch, who performed alongside Deborah Findlay and Hattie Morahan. For the Citizens production, Kathryn Howden and Maureen Carr will appear alongside the theatre’s current young acting interns, Lucy Hollis and Alasdair Hankinson.
Also involved in the week of readings was Edinburgh-based playwright and director Zinnie Harris, who directed Churchill’s 1994 play, The Skriker, about an ancient fairy who follows a pair of teenage mothers in various guises. Given her own experiments with form in plays such as The Wheel, it’s no surprise to find that Harris is a fan of Churchill.
“As an artist she is extraordinary,” Harris says. “If you think over the body of her work, no two Caryl Churchill plays are the same. Not even similar. Every Churchill play is an audacious theatrical experiment, challenging form and expectations again and again. But this isn’t experimentation for its own sake, she uses this bold theatrical language to uncover and expose often painful truths, and its so skilfully achieved that audiences will go happily wherever she leads them.
“Sometimes the surreal surprises you, sometimes it is there from the opening moment. I love her work for that. She is like a great banner waving to the rest of us, saying don’t be lazy, keep pushing, let theatre take you to places we haven’t dreamed of yet.”
Far Away (And Seagulls), Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, May 23-June 8. www.citz.co.uk