Caryl ChurchillAnmeldelser

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Churchill explores the various ways women have coped with ambition and maternity in fable and history. At an imaginary dinner for a modern woman celebrating her promotion at an employment agency, famous characters from history join her to talk to each other and share their stories: Griselda and Pope Joan, Isabella Bird, Lady Niho, Dull Gret. Scene 2 brings us to the more concrete present, where we see what has earned her this promotion, how she treats and coaches the women she places. Act 2 reveals what her life has cost her, and others, and what it might mean to give up everything to be Top Girl. Very much of its Thatcherite time, but still relevant.

A Number... of Clones
Review of the Theatre Communications Group paperback (2003) of the original Nick Hern Books paperback (2002)

If you've followed my reviews for a long enough time, you will have likely noticed that I have somewhat of an obsessive interest in the music of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. This causes me to document all sorts of related offbeat items such as listing books with Fictional Characters Who Love Arvo Pärt or books with Poetry Inspired by Arvo Pärt alongside books about the music of the composer himself.

See photograph at https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8d3360f4cb69bede4fcb2e77e4a114a14c9389c6/0_27_240...
Actors Lennie Henry and Paapa Essiedu in the 2022 revival of Caryl Churchill's "A Number" at the Old Vic Theatre in London, England. Photograph sourced from the Guardian.

So when I saw a recent review of a revival of Caryl Churchill's play A Number (2002) which included the lines:

Turner’s production is beautifully rounded – and spiky. Every aspect presses on Churchill’s themes. Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, an insistent set of variations, is woven between scenes.

I was obviously going to follow that up with at least a reading of the play.

Churchill's play deals with the subject of cloning. Over the course of 5 scenes, a father named Salter meets with different versions of his son, one named Michael and two named Bernard (called B1 and B2 in the script). The same actor plays all versions of the son. The dramatic tension of the play involves each of the sons confronting the father after learning that they are only 1 of perhaps many copies. There is also uncertainty about whether the father is telling the truth to all of them. Each son feels betrayed in their own way about not being unique and one is even set on murdering the others.

This was an interesting play about the ethics of cloning and it certainly sets up a terrific set of variations for the younger actor in the piece to play different versions of the same person. I was pleased to discover it due to its musical interlude association.

Trivia and Link
Caryl Churchill's A Number first premiered in 2002 with Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig in the father and sons roles.
See photograph at https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/4f9c496a0fb2f173be063898807c2d1a2b5a1271/0_0_2464...
Actors Daniel Craig (who played the sons) and Michael Gambon (who played the father) in a promotional photograph from the premiere performances of "A Number" in 2002 at the Royal Court Theatre. Image sourced from The Guardian.

A Number was adapted for a television film version in 2008 directed by James MacDonald and starred Rhys Ifans as the sons and Tom Wilkinson as the father. A trailer for it can be viewed on YouTube here.½

I'm not the biggest fan of Caryl Churchill but this is far and away her best work! Seeing a top-notch professional production might account for my positive reaction to it - without seeing it onstage, I had a very difficult time envisioning the play when I read it the first time.

interesting exploration of sexual politics, but didn't feel like much more than just that-- an exploration

Churchill's play is a mix of drama and comedy, with elements of fantasy and Freud thrown in for good effect. I enjoyed seeing a performance of the play more than I enjoyed reading it. This was primarily because the acting and the direction of the play brought out its best moments.

Top Girls is the story of one woman’s rise to success and of the other women in her life (as well as those in history) whose experiences call hers into question. Its all-female cast speaks from a wide variety of cultural and political positions in dialogue that is orchestrated on the page almost like musical lines and themes, with numerous interruptions, dual conversations, and simultaneous speeches which undercut or highlight one another. The resulting development of the play shows success for the assertive Marlene who has reached the top of the hierarchy at an employment agency, along with the price that she had to pay to achieve that success. The darker side of the play portrays her sister and niece who are living a more proletarian lifestyle.

The mixture of the two with the addition of a lengthy fantastic dinner scene to open the play provides more questions than answers about what the message of the drama is. Since it was first produced in 1982, the play may be a little dated, but much of the drama seems timely enough. It is the somewhat confusing delivery of that drama over the space of two acts and five scenes that left this reader slightly less than satisfied.

Because I was listening to this play rather than watching it, the switch from Marlene's dinner party to her niece was jarringly abrupt. In fact, at first I thought that there was a problem with the recording. The dinner party was amusing so I didn't expect the emotion of the ending (though upon reflection, there was plenty of foreshadowing).

Listened to this play courtesy of the LATW website streaming broadcast.½

Caryl Churchill explores what it means to be a woman and a feminist in her play Top Girls. It begins with a unique premise: when career-driven businesswoman Marlene receives a promotion at work, she invites several historical and literary figures to a dinner party to celebrate her success. As the night progresses, we learn of each woman’s backstory and the hardships they faced in life, including rape, abuse, and abandonment. The remaining acts shift the narrative to Marlene’s home life and her strained relationship with her family. Top Girls is a strong critique of pseudo-feminists who raise themselves up on the backs of others and define their feminism purely by their successes in business. Although the play was originally written and performed in the early 1980s, its themes feel incredibly relevant today in light of the current political/social climate and the #metoo movement.

i really liked the first act; the second two felt like a tease to me - like, clearly there is a history here between these characters, but we're never really allowed into it. we're always being kept outside. i just felt lukewarm about the whole thing, really.
i do think that this issue i feel with the characterisation could be resolved on stage - not only through the ability of the actor, but also through doubling between the historical and modern figures. (my copy gestured towards this doubling in the introduction but didn't actually include what that doubling typically is, which i thought was silly.)

Poignant play, both comedy and tragedy, through the British Music Hall tradition, examining gender and roles (and stereotypes of all sorts).

It is not that often that I read plays. Sometimes they work well as literary texts and other times, it is just better to see them live. Serious Money, by Caryl Churchill, is for me, a play that falls into the latter category. Mainly because of jumps in speech, the singing, and the fast pace and often doubled scenes. That isn’t to say that the play is not fun to read, just that it would be better live. I must admit that when a play is described as rhyming couplets about the stock exchange in London, my interests are piqued.

I have a love/hate relationship with the rhyming in Churchill’s play. Sometimes it made me laugh and other times it made me cringe. Although, upon reflection, I wonder if that is half the point? The play is extremely fast-paced and I loved that the characters are unapologetic about their greed and love of money. Scilla, was by far my favourite character. Despite the fact that she is more interested in her brother’s, Jake’s, investments than she is about his death, Scilla is extremely ballsy. And I think for the time that it was written (the late 80s), Scilla is the beautiful imperfect anti-woman. She is hard, unforgiving, driven, potty-mouthed, and everything that is not demure.

Churchill’s play was received with mixed reviews when it premiered. Some said the play was amazing and others were annoyed by the rhyming and the technical banker/stock exchange jargon. For a person who grew up after the stock exchange Big Bang, countless law suits involving Swiss banks and dirty money, and corruption and consumerism on speed, I was less than shocked by the play’s content. In fact, my lack of shock only reminded me of how cynical I’ve become, or been made.

This play is complicated and despite its short length, you should be warned that it will take you a while to pick up the pace and rhythm of it. It will also introduce you, if you don’t already know, to a game called “Pass the Pigs”. I highly suggest, that if you aren’t interested in the play, at least try the game! It’s a favourite of mine.

Another Ardgour readthrough. I want to say 'I liked this a lot', but I'm not sure 'like' is a word I can associate with this weird ikky tale of colonialism, incest, adultery, paedophilia and orgies. It ought to be trying too hard - everything is shock factor turned up to 11. But the language is so slick, and makes you flinch and laugh and cry all at the same time, with wry dark humour and deep insight. It's a play of two halves, which while they have parallels and echos are mostly disjoint. The first half is colonial Africa, a man trying to keep the white beacon of God, Queen, Family and Respectability burning through a mess of lust, unrequited love, fights with the natives, and Christmas. The second half is the 1970s, and a sprawling mess of people bringing up children, having sex, and trying to work out who they are and what they like in the world.

As with many anthologies, a bit of a mixed bag. The works here don't have a common theme, other than perhaps the rejection of standard linear story-telling and the Aristotelian three-part structure. The women are strong, but the author does have an unfortunate tendency to resort to the stereotypical strong, bitchy woman that mows others over in her path. There is definitely a streak of feminism, but at times a sense that the author is lashing out against feminism in favor of a version of femininity. Still, the plays are interesting and quirky, and definitely well worth a look.

A story of revolution in Romania in 1989. Churchill began writing this play as a project with students while the events were still going on. She brought out the fear and the elation, as well as the suspicion, of the people involved. A good work but not particularly easy to read. It is written more for watching than for reading.½

Churchill writes about the difficulties of facing a changing world. She typically writes from a socialist perspective, and one of the plays, Serious Money, is an indictment of the current monetary system of Wall Street and its British equivalent. These plays were all during the Thatcher era, and that shows through in the work, as the concerns about the loss of the safety net and the decreasing support for the poor are demonstrated in each work. In one of her most renowned works, Top Girls, Churchill is concerned with the difficulties of being a woman even in today's (in this case, today being the 1980s) world. Well worth the time to read and discuss. Too bad they are not performed more often.½

As staged in NYC this was a witty and thought-provoking piece of theatre. The text is devoid of any kind of stage direction or even identification of the speaker, however, which might make it a confusing read. Each scene, some only a few lines long, is self-contained and explores some aspect of perception or memory. For example, a family rewatching a wedding video observe that they can't really remember the wedding anymore, only the video of the wedding. Despite the title, love is not really on the agenda.

Clever and frightening. I think many people would probably find the play boring, but it strikes at the heart of identity. The play is about cloning, but it goes somewhere deeper, into a place where questions about self-identity, and what it means to be an individual--let alone a human being--lurk. If you like drama that is also philosophical, then pick this one up. If you like science fiction that tends to take place in the near future, then give this one a try. "A Number," is somewhere near Beckett and Dick, but tends has a tendency to swim toward soap operas to learn how to transliterate intense topics for the "every-day" person.

It's kind of scary how well the political, militant and public relations between the US and UK government works when represented by a gay male couple. Let's be honest, we all made Bush/Blair jokes during those dark days but Churchill's approach to the subject really gives it a brutal honesty I've never seen before. It's a tough play to read because of the inter-connecting dialogue but I imagine it would work wonderfully when performed. One man's sentence almost seamlessly blends with the others to the point where you don't who whose words are which, much in the same way our foreign policies began to mirror. Your mileage may vary on your opinions regarding the portrayals but it is a fascinating glimpse into the idea of being so in love yet becoming increasingly disillusioned not with a man but with an idea.

A play about cloning runs the risk of creating a false situation, totally unscientific, and also of becoming a moralizing tome filled with utter silliness. This one manages to avoid both of those problems. It takes no ethical stance on cloning, and does not posit some ridiculous notion such as Hitler cloned and being Hitler all over again. It keeps the science vague enough not to step out of bounds of feasibility, and it simply presents a situation. The audience is left to make up its own mind. It's disjointed, rambling, without a clear point, and the language is understated - it reads like a Beckett play. It falls a bit short of Beckett himself, but comes close enough to generate the sense that here is someone who knows what she is doing. I'd be interested to see this staged.½

I’m skeptical of the notion of inspiration. But reading Caryl Churchill’s plays set my playwright mind off in new and interesting directions all the time. She’s so bold and original and odd and clever, pulling off stunts that shouldn’t be possible. She’s the kind of playwright who can introduce a ghost in the last two pages of a play, or let the entire human civilization having collapsed between scenes two and three.

This collection includes four plays. “Top Girls”, probably Churchill’s most well-known play, I read only a year ago and have since seen staged, so I skip it this time. The others are a mixed bunch, and not Churchill at her very strongest, perhaps. But still better than almost anything. “Softcops” deals with the idea of the modern prison, based on Bentham’s Panopticon, and how it changes the way authorities demonstrate power. Instead of the public flexing of muscles via executions and floggings, we get the sneaky notion that we might be watched at any given time. Churchill sets her piece in 1830ies France, with a cast of mostly actual people, and a nice blend of realism and symbolism.

One of my own plays was compared to “Fen” when it was staged, so it was fun to finally read it and see that there’s some truth to the comparison. Set in a part of Britain which is traditionally poor potato country, but now being gullied out into fine farmland and bought up by multis, the play is a rich tapestry of life in the Fens. A large cast of characters, most of who only appears once or twice, are still given a real sense of life. In the middle is a tragic and ambivalent love story. This is my favorite play of this collection, a good example of Churchill’s ability to work with gaps and leaps of time.

“Serious money” is another play I’ve read before. It’s set under the finanicial Big Bang of the eighties, and is written as a broad Elizabethan epic – in verse! Churchill excels in lingo and ambience, and her cold eye towards the world of the stock market is merciless. Scilla’s brother Jake commits what appears to be a suicide in the middle of a very prosperous career. Rumors of large scale inside trading start going around, and Scilla is determined to find out what happened. And to find the money. “Serious money” is a difficult play to read, as much of it is almost choir work and the language is peppered with terminology. The conclusion is also somewhat weak, and it comes across a little dated. Still, the boldness of the play remains, and it’s difficult to read without feeling very impressed indeed.

I prefer the later Churchill. But in these plays, of the seventies and eighties, her voice is already unique and powerful. Makes me want to work!

Oh, this play made me cry. It's a brutal yet humourous portrayal of Marlene (a top executive) and her sister (a single mother) and manages to illustrate the questions of duty, choice, motherhood and what women should be brilliantly while leaving us no easy answers or trite moral messages at the end of the play.

This is a really good collection of some of the most noteworthy British plays from the nineties, topped with a portal work by Carly Churchill as a forerunner. I’ve read and/or seen most of them, but two of the plays have been kind of embarrassing gaps is my professional knowledge for many years – something I’m glad to have mended now.

“Top Girls” is probably Caryl Churchill’s most well-known play, but I wouldn’t say it’s her best. Still, reading it again after maybe ten years, Churchill still amazes me. From the bold dinner party featuring women from history and fiction (how many scenes inspired by it has been written since???) over the second act’s look at professional women in the early stages of 80ies cold individualism and finally the flashback in the third act tying up Angie’s story so so subtly. Damn. Awesome, in the true sense of the word.

“Hysteria” is probably the weakest play in this collection. Or at least it hasn’t received the same status as the rest of the plays here. But this strange mixture of unflinching farce (complete with naked women in wardrobes), psycho analysis and childhood horror, starring Freud and Dalí, works, even though it really shouldn’t. I find myself interested again in why Freud chose to change his viewpoint regarding female hysteria, and the potential betrayal therein. I saw it in the mid-nineties, and wouldn’t mind seeing it staged again.

“Blasted” is among my favorite Sarah Kane plays still. It’s just so horrible and stark and yet, right at the end, finds a tiny streak of grace and mercy. And the way Kane brings real war into an abusive relationship in a hotel room in Leeds remains a very clever metaphor. It’s really sad we lost Sarah Kane so much too early. Very in ye face stuff though, and I wouldn’t trust just anyone to produce it.

“Shopping and fucking” is one of those modern classics I’ve managed to neither see or read. That’s thankfully mended now. It’ s easy to see Ravenhill’s play’s appeal. It’s a sharp, cold and darkly humorous look at a society where everything is for sale, and where we aren’t even comfortable with love unless we feel we’re paying our dues. Like with Kane, there are a few instances of pure shock value that feels just a little unnecessary. But this play still packs a punch, and is neatly composed, with lots of stuff going on between the scenes.

“The beauty queen of Leenane” is another modern classic I haven’t seen or read. Indeed, I haven’t read anything by McDonagh before. Which is strange, since I know he’s a big influence on several playwrights I really like, not to mention that I myself is very involved in telling stories against another backdrop than the urban one. This tragic little tale of dependency, desperation and mutual cruelty is wonderfully composed, and I really enjoyed it. Must be looking for more plays by McDonagh!

If you’re at all into reading plays, this is a really good collection presenting a handful of modern classics. I think they are all very readable too – not always the case with modern drama. Bear in mind though that the British nineties were a lot about putting scary things on stage – if stuff like rimming, rape and dead babies scare you off, this is not a book for you. Otherwise, a very good introduction, or a collection well worth reading for itself.½

Set in the early Thatcher years, Top Girls is a serminal play of the modern theatre, revealing a world of women's experience at a pivotal moment in British history. Told by an eclectic group of historical and modern characters in a continuous conversation across ages and generations, Top Girls was hailed as 'the best British play ever by a woman dramatist'