Plays, of course, are meant to be seen and not read, but it’s not always possible to see every play. They are not complete on the page, certainly in contemporary theatre where plays can be more collaboratively made than ever before. However, it encourages us (and hopefully others) to read more widely. For the third year, here is our #ReadaPlayaWeek initiative. And, as achieved in 2015, we shall try to choose 26 male playwrights and 26 female playwrights for our play choices.
Week 1: Caryl Churchill's Here We Go (2015)
I read Caryl Churchill’s Here
We Go in Foyles on Charing Cross Road when I had some time to spare when in
London. Sorry Caryl Churchill. Sorry Foyles. Although I will most likely buy
another Churchill play soon. And I did buy something else on that visit to
Foyles. Interestingly, although my main purpose on that trip was to see
Pinter’s The Homecoming in the West
End, Here We Go seems to have made a
lasting impression. I couldn’t get to see Dominic Cooke’s production during its
rather short run at the National (hence one reason to want to read it), but,
from reading reviews, I gathered it was very divisive and focused on death.
The play is a triptych of acts: ‘Here We Go’ is set at a wake
after a funeral; ‘After’ in some sort of void after the man’s death; ‘Getting
There’ before the man’s passing in a care home.
In the first act, the lines are clipped so we only get the
gist of what the characters are saying. But the fragments of speech that they
say are the most crucial parts of what they’re saying. Churchill is so
observant of everyday speech. Over the act and the catches of conversation, we build
up a picture of the dead man: Labour, ran to be MP, was once a looker (although
the text says that it doesn’t necessarily have to be the same person who has
deceased in each act). When reading a play, you try to imagine it staged.
Staging the play, I guess that a director is faced with the decision of whether
to surround the glimpses of conversation with moments of silence as if left to complete
the sentences ourselves or to move straight onto the next line. In Cooke’s
production, I hear, he went for the latter option, constantly moving the act
and different conversations forward. It is remarkable that the deceased man has
more of a presence in this act despite not being in it, compared to act three
which he is in.
At the end of the first act are bits of speech of how characters
die which Churchill stipulates that the actors should spontaneously step
forward and interrupt the flow of the scene to address the audience. What a
challenge to a group of performers to have to work together to allow these
spontaneous additions. Plus, how brilliant is it of the playwright to reflect
the play’s subject matter in the form of the play? The actors are expecting the
speeches but don’t know when just like we know we are going to die but don’t
know when. The last, and most striking of these, (although the morbidity of
them all is strangely fascinating) is of someone (we don’t quite know who in
the text) saying how she commits suicide and regrets how her body was found (if
I’m remembering correctly). It ends the act (in the text at least) on an uneasy
note of regret and the unknown which, in a way, is a neat way of seguing into
act two.
If the sparsity of the language in the first act is Churchill
not over-egging the pudding, act two sees an almost stream of unconscious thought.
Like Beckett’s Not I but with more
focus on the body, it sees the man, now dead, question where he is, what will
happen to his soul and body and ponder over a lot of what ifs. That is if I’m remembering
it right, the hustle and bustle of Christmas shoppers around me at that point
made me perhaps go through the scene at a pace which is perhaps not unlike how
it could be performed. He mentions mythic gods and wonders about the
possibilities of life after death, questioning the unknowns of death. How
daring, some might say, it is of Churchill (now 77) to push past those taboos
of death and to put on stage thoughts about death that are perhaps not often
heard.
Death in theatre can make audiences uncomfortable. The
opening scene in Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen
(beautifully orchestrated by director Matthew Dunster) had the audience in
stitches one moment with the characters’ jibes at the north and
inappropriately-timed grammatical corrections. Then, as the rope is put round
Hennessy’s neck and the floor opens up to hang a most-probably innocent man, we
were in stunned silence. Likewise, in Catherine Hayes’ formally tedious play Skirmishes, we are expecting the elderly
and mostly unconscious Mother (as she’s called) to die at some point throughout
the play. It is enough, then, to provoke uncomfortable (perhaps risible?)
laughter when, after eventually passing away, she alarmingly comes back to life
after a few moments. Hayes’ point, perhaps, is that death can be painfully drawn-out
for the dying and their loved ones.
The third act of Here
We Go, from one perspective, seems to dramatise that decline in old age. If
he is the same man spoken about in the first act and of whose many achievements
we hear, here he is reduced to an ailing body, his life a repeated series of simple
actions. It’s sad and made me think of elderly relatives and is also a reminder
of the way elderly people can be treated. The act’s title, ‘Getting There’, could
refer to his approaching death but also made me think of what the scene is
getting to, dramatically. I would have been curious to see Cooke’s production.
The act’s length may have been tedious at times but I’m guessing tedium and becoming
conscious of yourself and the bodies around you is part of it. On the page, the
man is continually dressed and undressed ‘for as long as the scene lasts’,
leaving it up to the director to decide its actual playing length. But there
are two characters in this scene. It’s a scene of binaries: the carer and the
patient, the old and the young. But interestingly, as Matt Trueman has also pointed
out, they now share the same life, carrying out the simple tasks, dressing and
undressing, walking to the chair and to the bed, in the care home.
Churchill is always pushing the boundaries of form in
theatre. Here We Go is no exception.
It is testing and inventive and as perplexing as its subject. I have so many
thoughts about the play, all of which I can’t articulate here, but Here We Go has made me look forward to
her new play, Escaped Alone which
opens at the Royal Court later this month, even more.
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