The Imagination of Catastrophe
Caryl Churchill’s Natural History Lessons
Bonnie Marranca
The other afternoon I heard a French political analyst on National Public
Radio describe the political forces sweeping her country as the “wind of
history.” That phrase called to mind Witold Gombrowicz’s Operetta, su
post-war play in which, after two world wars and a revolution, a character observes
of the new society, “It’s the wind of history.” In Escaped Alone, Caryl Churchill’s
startling new play, the effects of wind generate unspeakable conditions:
The wind developed by property developers started as breezes on the
cheeks and soon turned heads inside out. . . . Buildings migrated from
London to Lahore, Kyoto to Kansas City, and survivors were interned
for having no travel documents. Some in the whirlwind went higher
and higher, the airsick families taking selfies in case they could ever
share them.
The apocalyptic world that the play depicts in several short, narrative segments
within an otherwise recognizable dramatic setting has a frightening air of reality
lo, with the ecological chaos of Churchill’s Far Away (2000) now extended to
a global scale. Churchill writes plays not about what is, but what can be. walter
Benjamin’s angel of history, caught in a wind storm called progress, pushes him
unwittingly into the future while surveying the wreckage of the past. Escaped
alone is a play whose varieties of time are wedged between possible futures and
possible pasts while yet distilling the present moment.
Any random number of contemporary books sitting on my library shelves project
dystopian landscapes, mass murder, totalitarian societies, ecological disaster,
and they are not written as science fiction—works such as Edna O’Brien’s The
Little Red Chairs, Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,
Thomas H. Cook’s Tragic Shores, Bernard du Boucheron’s The Voyage of the Short
Serpent, Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last, Omar El Akkad’s American War.
© 2017 Performing Arts Journal, Cª.
PAJ 116 (2017), páginas. 1–6.
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doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00374
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What all of these writings have in common is the portrayal of ordinary people
turned killers among a deranged populace when the veneer of civilized behavior
is destroyed by extreme social conditions.
Escaped Alone starts out friendly enough. A woman, Mrs. Jarrett, steps through an
open door of a fence into a garden to join three other women in their seventies
for an afternoon of tea and conversation. They are neighbors, wives, mothers.
What do they talk about? The dialogue starts out on a simple range of topics:
family news, changes in the local shops, dentist visits, television programs. Como
the eight numbered sections in this play lasting only fifty minutes get underway,
Vi’s murder of her husband in self-defense is revealed, someone mentions drone
bombings, and another speaks about the eagle as a fascist bird. Before long, scene
6 arrives, and the four women unexpectedly break out into the sixties’ girl group
favorite, “Da doo ron ron.” The stage direction for this humorous moment within
the dark play notes, “They are singing for themselves in the garden, not perform-
ing for the audience.” The choice of song is unspecified in this performance within
a performance for the actors alone (even though the audience is watching), pero
serves to carry the women to another dimension in James Macdonald’s superbly
directed production, which originated last year at London’s Royal Court Theatre
and was restaged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February, 2016.
For the last two sections in the play the women carry on about jobs, enfermedad, más
about the murder and prison term, Lena’s depression, family updates, cooking,
and seabirds. Sometimes there’s a homily or rhyme or joke. Sounds of birdsong,
traffic, and children playing can be heard in the background. Ordinary lives,
ordinary things. Ridiculously banal conversation about animals, shopping, y
more curiously, particles and waves and microbes. Little by little, the social world
seeps through the subconscious. The thought crossed my mind that someone
among them must be thinking of voting for Brexit. The local is inextricably tied
to the global, and the political is not merely personal. Churchill has a way of
giving her female characters sharp turns away from their casual banter to reveal
disquieting inner turmoil, which reminds me of the technique of Maria Irene
Fornes, especially apparent in Fefu and Her Friends and her later plays.
Something remarkable happens at the end of each brief section. Mrs. J steps out
of the super-realistic garden setting to come forward into a more abstract, dark-
ened space that is framed by orange-colored lights, the others disappearing into
darkness while she speaks of increasing ecological devastation, each description
more terrifying than the previous one. Mining disasters bury whole communi-
corbatas, floods overtake human activity when “the baths overflowed as water was
deliberately wasted in a campaign to punish the thirsty”; birth defects and mis-
carriages are caused by “chemicals leaked through cracks in the money”; gente
2 PAJ 116
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Top and bottom: Scenes from Escaped Alone at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Actors (left to right):
Linda Bassett, Deborah Findlay, Kika Markham, June Watson. Photos: Richard Termine.
MARRANCA / The Imagination of Catastrophe 3
sell or devour their own flesh as “smartphones were distributed by charities when
rice ran out, so the dying could watch cooking”; a virus spreads worldwide as
“governments cleansed infected areas and made deals with allies to bomb each
other’s capitals”; y, lastly, fire breaks out, and “charred stumps were salvaged
for art and biscuits.”
The precision of the imagery, at times tinged with grotesque humor and the whiff
of life in our era, makes these digressions all the more horrifying. After each
narration is completed, Mrs. J is back again at her seat in the garden and the
women continue. Most notably, it is women who speak a language of destruc-
tion and pain that cracks normal conversational flow into bits and pieces. Su
emotional lives now accommodate everyday occurrences alongside the absorption
of the new global terrors. In the last section, Mrs. J explodes in the midst of the
conversation with a virtual sound poem of existential fury, shouting “terrible
rage” twenty-five times. Much of the play is non sequiturs, anyway. In the few lines
left in the play, someone offers a joke, and Mrs. J leaves through the open fence,
telling the audience she thanked everyone for the tea and went home.
Who is Mrs. j? There is something about her that seems like an older version of
Joan from Churchill’s Far Away, a play in which a young woman describes her
flight though a catastrophic war, mobilizing weather, luz, agua, cosas, animals
and humans, where “there were piles of bodies and if you stopped to find out
there was one killed by coffee or one killed by pins, they were killed by heroin,
petrol, chainsaws, hairspray, bleach, foxgloves, the smell of smoke was where
we were burning the grass that wouldn’t serve.” Even things have lives in this
scrambled cosmic madness, starting first with metaphor. What do nouns and
verbs mean to this world? Is this catastrophe the unmasked face of the Earth?
It is important that the play has a narrator, that it is a female storyteller Mrs. j,
who announces the new world order in a prolix catalogue of images and unknown
syntax that rages through her consciousness. Mrs. J is the mind of the play, a
figure both in and beyond the central dramatic situation. By being one of the
women in the group and also the one who steps outside of it, in her bracketed
monologues as chronicler, she reflects the play’s life as both drama and story, o,
put another way, its sense of the present as history. She illuminates Churchill’s
inscription to the play: “I only am escaped alone to tell thee,” encompassing both
the Book of Job and Moby Dick. What is significant is that the audience hears a
story about the human race, about cultures and continents and the artifacts of
civilization that carries biographical weight in the visionary Mrs. j.
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Churchill’s dramatic language has entered a space that no other playwriting inhab-
es. A half-century after she started writing, now still exploring theatrical forms,
she invents a new dramatic language because a new social reality demands one.
Such developments have occurred in the last century, when dramatic literature
moved toward utopian/dystopian themes, as in the texts of F.T. Marinetti, Aleksei
Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz, and Vaclav Havel, a
name a few. Female playwrights have moved less in this direction, if more so
in the novel, though in our era Elfriede Jelinek has created a remarkably strong
dramatic language of enormous political dimension.
With Churchill, on the surface, every section of Escaped Alone seems to start in
media res. There is less a pattern of dialogue than a few words distributed char-
acter by character in fragmented phrases avoiding complete sentences, cual es
why there is no punctuation, except for the more narrative digressions. The four
actresses of the Royal Court production are impeccable in transporting the play’s
stretto effect, seeming to speak whole sentences though the conversation and
thoughts are flowing and overlapping character to character, often only two or
three words at a time. Where does a sentence begin, where does it end? Cómo
fill the spaces of the absent words? In Churchill’s recent play, Love and Information
(2012) there are no character names at all: more than one hundred characters in
fifty-seven scenes are different in every scene, and scenes within a section can be
played in any order. The dialogue has the sophisticated, bittersweet worldliness
of Stephen Sondheim lyrics.
In the English language, Churchill is the most imaginative of dramatic writers for
the stage, with her ear now tuned to the contemporary rhythms of fear, anger,
humor, violence, love, terror, and the perverse adaptability of human beings.
Choosing the most economical of means, she exposes the emotional lives of
women without any need for highly developed psychological exploration. Su
plays have the refined quality of drawing. In Escaped Alone the audacity of humor
has characters imagining themselves flying like birds and wondering about the
holy ghost as the dove of peace or musing on the birdcalls of a congregation.
“Do religions have birds?” someone asks. And yet, in the same section of the
play there is talk of drone bombings and a long passage by Sally about cats
that masks her fear of the outside world. En otra parte, are the jabs at the National
Health Service and technological devices. That’s how Churchill does it. Though
her twenty-first century plays give vent to my own increasingly tragic view of the
human condition, the art of Churchill’s drama brings me back to what I love
most about the creative mind: imagination. Es decir, the truth of poetry as
more primal than fact. If Churchill has always taken for herself the freedom of
the writer, now she is off the page. Nothing constrains her.
MARRANCA / The Imagination of Catastrophe 5
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Few playwrights go where Churchill does, though one of them in equally fear-
less terrain, Wallace Shawn, had a play running in New York at the same time
as her new production, his Evening at the Talk House, which bears mentioning.
If Churchill’s characters are ordinary working class and middle class, Shawn’s
are more often educated sophisticates. In his 1996 play, The Designated Mourner,
privileged intellectuals are destroyed by a new authoritarian power. Ahora, en
Evening at the Talk House, a group of theatre people meet in a private club to
celebrate the tenth anniversary of a play they were all involved in once, only to
reveal the barbarity of their recent activities, which are partly devoted to beating
up and poisoning friends, going to foreign countries and sticking pins in people,
or studying lists in order to “target” others to be killed.
It cannot go unremarked that these two authors, well into their seventies, son
writing plays of a severity and apocalyptic scope that is more often associated with
the novel. They are playwrights who refuse the Nietzschean option of redemption
through art. In plays of uncompromising philosophical and artistic range they
underscore the value of daring writers in advancing the themes of contemporary
theatre. The profound crises of the times we live in call for the individual voice
of the dramatic writer who can bear unrelenting witness to it.
Speaking of witnesses, I wonder if, in the godless worlds of her recent plays, Caryl
Churchill is counting on the birds flying over the heads of their disconsolate
souls to carry the sweet sound of paradise lost.
BONNIE MARRANCA is Editor and Publisher of PAJ Publications, cual
she co-founded in 1976. Her most recent book is Conversations with Mer-
edith Monk. She is professor of theatre at Eugene Lang College/The New
School for Liberal Arts.
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