Latest news with #WhatIfIfOnly
New York Times
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Caryl Churchill Times Four Makes an Infinity of Worlds
A girl made of glass. A god — or, really, all of them. Ghosts, but of the future. An imp who may be trapped in a bottle. Just another day in Caryl Churchill's world. The arrival of new work by Churchill is like the arrival of a new theorem in a supposedly settled body of knowledge. 'Cloud Nine' (1979) explored gender as colonialism; 'Escaped Alone' (2016) domesticated the apocalypse. 'Drunk Enough to Say I Love You' (2006) reframed the alliance of Britain and the United States as a sloppy date. Clones and multiverses are part of her world. With a mathematician's precision, she posits ways of thinking about the universe and its inhabitants that, even when baffling, give more dimension to our experience of both. Her latest investigations take the form of a collection of four one-act plays at the Public Theater, under the portmanteau title 'Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.' Written separately over the last few years, each is pointed enough on its own: short and edgy. But together, in a splendid and surprisingly emotional production directed by James Macdonald, a frequent Churchill collaborator, they are so sharp you hardly feel them slicing your skin. 'Glass' is the most literally shattering. The life of a girl made of the substance, who lives on a mantelpiece for safety, is encompassed in 13 minutes. Her mother frets over her, her brother brags about her, her mantelpiece neighbors — an old clock, a plastic dog, a painted vase — compete with her. (She may be pretty, the clock says, but he's useful.) Soon the girl (Ayana Workman) meets a flesh-and-blood boy (Japhet Balaban) who is entranced by the transparency of her feelings: He can see straight into them, with no need for words. When his own feelings are spoken, in the form of whispers we do not hear, the express bus to tragedy departs. The way intimacy opens to loss is a theme here; the way abstractions become characters is a miracle. Somehow, it takes just a moment to adjust to the bizarre setup and the ensuing complications. (The mother warns that if the girl goes out for a walk with the boy, she had better wear Bubble Wrap.) Nor do we trouble ourselves that the production makes no attempt to literalize the figurines. They're just us. Likewise just us: the gods represented by one actor in 'Kill.' I say one actor, but Deirdre O'Connell is so singular, she's plural. On a puffy white cloud (sets by Miriam Buether), in a cream and gold chenille lamé suit (costumes by Enver Chakartash), she looks down on the ancient parade of human viciousness with amusement and despair and every feeling in between. Not many actors could parse — let alone make both funny and awful — a maniacal, 12-minute monologue that's basically a mixed grill of Greek and Roman sagas. A typical, barely punctuated sample: 'She's committed to being her husband's enemy taking his longtime enemy as her lover, her husband's cousin who wants all that family dead, she's his enemy as soon as he kills their daughter cutting her throat on the altar to get wind for sailing to his brother's war' — on it goes through a thousand horrid demises. Bring a classicist with you to sort out the sources, though it doesn't matter. To the gods, it's all gossip, delivered by O'Connell in the manner of a Southern barfly facing last call. Representing the divine as a debauchee is a brilliant choice, demonstrating a key Churchillian theme: All evil is human evil. 'It's not our fault,' O'Connell says at one point, voicing the gods. 'We don't exist.' The human need to fabricate other worlds and blame ours upon them is also the subject of the third play, 'What If If Only.' A man (Sathya Sridharan) so mourns the loss of his wife that he opens a metaphysical door to an afterlife. But the being who then enters isn't in fact his wife; she's a ghost of 'the dead future,' one of the innumerable possibilities of who she might have become. All the man must do to revive her, the being explains, is 'make me happen' — but, he wails, he doesn't know how. I say he and she for the mourner and the mourned, because that's how this production has cast them, but Churchill doesn't specify. (In the play's online premiere, the mourner was female and her late spouse male.) The story doesn't care about that; it cares about the larger truth that anyone who has suffered a great loss, which is to say everyone, will understand immediately: We can't get them back. There are only more-or-less unwanted substitute futures, suggested in a swishing soundscape of voices designed by Bray Poor. Surely it's no coincidence that the play appeared shortly after Churchill's husband of 60 years, the lawyer David Harter, died in 2021. 'Glass,' 'Kill' and 'What If If Only' make up the first half of the Public's program, along with two charming intermezzos: an acrobat (Junru Wang) performing hand balancing maneuvers on tiny podiums called canes; and a juggler (Maddox Morfit-Tighe) executing flourishes, spins and traps with clubs. In front of a gold proscenium with flashing chasers (lighting by Isabella Byrd), these acts suggest a kind of vaudeville, so fitting for Churchill's evolving take on tragedy as comedy, and vice versa. After an intermission, that thought is further revised in 'Imp.' Two 60-ish cousins, but not the kissing kind, share an apartment somewhere in England. Dot (O'Connell) has unspecified back problems that keep her in her easy chair. Jimmy (John Ellison Conlee) has ambitions toward fitness but sneakers not quite up to the task. Into their pleasantly carping ménage come two newcomers: their niece, Niamh (pronounced 'neeve'), from Ireland, and Rob, a local homeless man. I have not seen a Churchill work in the naturalistic domestic dramedy vein before, and it's fascinating. In 12 swift scenes that take up an hour, she easily achieves the plot density of premium cable, with its regular revelations, its ruptures and reunions. Niamh (Adelind Horan) and Rob (Balaban) begin a relationship that worries Dot and pleases Jimmy. Things progress and devolve in a broadly satisfying, almost familiar way. What makes this pure, strange Churchill is off to the side. It's that bottle, near Dot's chair, which she keeps as a kind of talisman or threat. Is there really something in it? What if it got out? Does it (as Dot claims) grant wishes, especially evil ones? Or is Dot, with her sharp tongue and tendency toward havoc, herself the imp? These questions, always physically present onstage, derange the domestic dramedy and get at the heart of Churchill's worldview. There is always something in the bottle. It did get out. Wishes, especially evil ones, are granted. Yes, Dot is the imp, and so are we all.
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Escaped Alone and What If If Only review – a dislocating Caryl Churchill evening of two halves
Escaped Alone (2016) is first in this double bill of short plays by the veteran dramatist Caryl Churchill, directed by Sarah Frankcom, the Royal Exchange's former artistic director. Three women occupy chairs on a square of grass; Churchill's text states they are 'at least 70'. A fourth woman (similar age) introduces the action: 'I'm walking down the street…' Seeing the others, she enters the garden and is greeted as Mrs Jarrett. At the close of the play, Mrs Jarrett leaves the others as she found them and, walking out through the auditorium, tells us: 'And then I said thanks for the tea and went home.' In between, the four pass the time chasing conversation topics, jibing, sharing memories, singing a song from their youth. Their disjointed dialogue feels stage-artificial, lacking the character-revealing crafting of close observers of suburban life (Alans Ayckbourn and Bennett, or Victoria Wood, for instance). The characters' inner selves are presented in monologues that offer cliches of older women. Two are fearful (cats, open spaces; Margot Leicester and Souad Faress, respectively), one is haunted by memories (of a dark deed – moving writing powerfully delivered by Annette Badland). Mrs Jarrett is of the 'doomed, we're all doomed' type (Maureen Beattie, deploying broad Scots to effect); her seven solos deliver verbal visions of dystopian apocalypse that sound like schlock-to-the-max blockbusters (backed by a rumbling soundscape from Nicola T Chang). The pleasure of the 55-minute performance lies in the acting. What If If Only (2021), at about 30 minutes, is more interesting and more emotionally engaging, centring on the grief of an individual following the death of their partner. A young woman (Danielle Henry) enters a sitting room strewn with books, records, pamphlets (revealed in a coup de théâtre by designer Rose Revitt, not to be spoiled by description). She looks through a box of photographs, talks to an empty chair – not empty to her, who sees in memory the lover who has died. She is visited by the ghosts of futures that might have been, the personifications of 'what if, if only' possibilities. First, and most insistent, is self-proclaimed 'brilliant future' (Badland), followed by a crowd of clamouring Futures (excellent community cast). Having shaken them off, she is confronted by the Present (Lamin Touray), who introduces her to, and invites her to choose, Child Future (Bea Glancy – wickedly vivid and a talent to watch). At the end, as at the beginning, the mourner looks through photos and talks to the empty space in the chair. Externally, nothing is different; yet this well-crafted, life-opening drama, beautifully directed and performed, has subtly changed us all. Star ratings (out of five) Escaped Alone ★★★ What If If Only ★★★★ Escaped Alone and What If If Only are at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 8 March
The Guardian
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Escaped Alone and What If If Only review – Caryl Churchill's double whammy of dazzling dread
Last month, wildfires ravaged southern California, President Trump issued executive orders on gender diversity and Storm Éowyn brought 100mph winds to the UK. Could any play be more timely than Caryl Churchill's Escaped Alone, with its apocalyptic visions of raging fires, a God who punishes gender dysphoria and a wind that 'turned heads inside out'? First seen in 2016, this startling chamber piece juxtaposes the inconsequential chitchat of four retired women with alarming descriptions of planetary destruction. Structured like a string quartet in which fluttering exchanges alternate with soulful solos, it is sometimes a leisurely free association, ranging from antiques to cats, soap opera to superpowers, and sometimes a terrifying catalogue of rising waters, miscarriages and societal collapse. In Sarah Frankcom's crisp, ethereal production, Maureen Beattie is cast as a gnomic outsider. In the part of Mrs Jarrett, she shuffles on stage with a shopping trolley, hair matted, head stooped, at once friends with the other three women and detached. Her clothes are more dowdy, her posture more tense. Even her Glasgow accent (mocked by Annette Badland's Vi) sets her apart in this English company. She frowns as if struggling to keep up with an alien language. She stands, hands clasped, while the others sit. And it is Mrs Jarrett, like a seer, who switches into the bleakest of monologues, as if unable to reconcile the banality of the back-garden chat with the enormity of the environmental threat. Beattie performs the dark poetry with trance-like intensity. But the rest is not entirely inane. Churchill is too subtle a writer for that. In the assured hands of Badland, Souad Faress and Margot Leicester, the conversation confounds, surprises and amuses, even as it spirals in its own direction. There are dark corners here too. After the interval, the playwright again addresses our sense of powerlessness in the short and stimulating What If If Only (first seen in 2021) in which Danielle Henry plays a young woman facing up to the 'ghost of a future that never happened'. On a stage filled with possible futures, including one promising 'equality and cake', she can, like theatre itself, only ever live in the moment. At the Royal Exchange theatre, Manchester, until 8 March
