The Brooklyn Rail

Caryl Churchill, eighty-six, is a grande dame of British theater, with over thirty works to her credit. Her plays often contain a suppressed violence, a world yielding to disorder and cruelty. She has championed women and other politically and socially vulnerable groups. The texts can be abbreviated, seemingly casual, with the intermittent hard knock of the hammer.

She succeeds in inventing a theatrical environment in which horrors can be powerfully evoked without the onstage gore of, say, Grand Guignol or Shakespeare. A master of suspense, like Hitchcock she repeats the same, initially innocent reference enough times that it acquires a fatal foreboding of evil. Her deceptively simple worlds operate according to their own rules, which are begrudgingly revealed, sometimes in a belated rush toward the close of a scene, though one always has the feeling that something is dangerously amiss from the beginning. She’s not preaching—that’s not her style—but there are still plenty of lessons to be learned.

Now, four new short plays, Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp., have come to The Public. Ably directed by James Macdonald, with whom Churchill has often worked and who also directed the London production, this quartet once again illuminates the deftness of her writing and stage imagination. The plays are, on the whole, rather frightening, though Churchill weaves enough comedic wit throughout to make it all bearable.

As occasionally elsewhere in her work, she makes objects talk in the creepy Glass. The characters are mostly decorative pieces on a mantel (a clock, a vase, a toy plane), here represented by actors casually costumed in athleisure wear. They speak of their neglect, desires, and jealousies in human terms, though, without giving away the plot, there is some breakage involved, something unlikely to heal well for the character whose substance gives this portion its name. And there’s a romance, but also child abuse. In this production, four actors portrayed the ten-character cast, the action proceeding atop a plinth with a horizontal bar of cool white light below. The characterizations and minor costume changes for the four actors were insufficient to make the whole range of characters easily distinguishable. Still, the atmosphere of imminent danger in this short, somewhat enigmatic piece came through. Ayana Workman provided a steady point of focus, embodying the innocence and fragility of the glass girl.

Next, Kill, in its stage directions, allows its performers considerable leeway. The character named People can either recite randomly from a list of short phrases or be silent. The Gods, on the other hand, are allotted a breathless, nameless recitation of what might well be a distillation of classical mythology, with lines like:

His red-eyed father tells him, full of rage, how the uncle steals the city they’re meant to share, how he serves a stew of chopped up bodies of his brother’s children. Not a new idea in that family eating children, it’s already in their nightmares. The boy realises the man he’s facing is his father.

The action is well summarized in the title. As the Gods, the divine Deirdre O’Connell delivers this classics redux with a mixture of glee, sadism, and pitiless indifference that is irresistible fun. In a white suit, she’s perched on a white cloud, above it all, but still delighted to tell the tales.

In this production, the People have been banished. Perhaps to compensate, an extraordinary gymnast performed in an entr’acte. The gymnastics seemed in sync with the frame of wonky lights around the stage, just another act at the circus. A later intermission featured a juggler skillfully tossing up to five pins in the air at once with the not quite so skilled assistance of a couple of audience members. The entr’actes summoned the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries when theater often resembled a kind of pre-vaudeville with interludes of various sorts between the acts. These nonverbal physical performances were truly entertaining, though not in the script; they were, however, also part of the Royal Court staging in 2019. That production also had a play called Bluebeard’s Friends instead of What If If Only, which was presented separately at the Royal Court in 2021.

What If If Only plays with the idea of varied possible timelines. The philosopher of history Reinhart Koselleck postulated in his book Vergangene Zukunft [Futures Past], that the past contained multiple futures. Similarly, Churchill here stages a crossroads of alternative temporal paths. The characters are a “someone,” F (Future), and P (Past), and then suddenly a host of futures begging to be realized. Despite its heavy intellectual conceit and “someone’s” woeful paralysis when forced to choose a future without knowing how it will turn out, the vignette principally maintains a light, playful tone. The action is housed in a white box of a set made of sheer, translucent fabric; a bottle of wine and a glass on a table where “someone” (Sathya Sridharan) mulls the loss of his loved one and how to fix it by altering time. The shadows, luminosity, and levitation of the simple set (lead scenic artist Miriam Buether) articulated well the ethereal realities of the play.

The most conventional playlet of the four, Imp, is nonetheless a voyage into a twisted, threatening world. Everything is extreme. One character (O’Connell) never leaves her chair. Another (John Ellison Conlee), suffering from psychic afflictions, runs obsessively. These impoverished invalids host a couple of seeming strangers: a homeless man (Japhet Balaban), who gives every sign of having a debilitating drug habit which has caused his life to fall apart, and a woman (Adelind Horan) who is successful though haunted by desires to flee and other conflicted feelings, a beehive of uncertainties. With this predicate, the short scenes unfold, parceling out all the menace threatening this squalid reality, including a possibly credible “imp” or evil genie in a bottle—just in case there wasn’t enough weird stuff happening already. Although there are some signs of hope for these desperate people, the mood is mostly dreadful. The outstanding cast, especially Conlee and O’Connell, makes these highly irregular people somehow comprehensible and sympathetic.

The dialogue is blunt and often strangely funny: “Yes she knows a lot of things. Astronomy. Mental illness.” In reply to the line, “Do you believe in anything, Rob?” there is the flat answer: “Not that I can think of just now.” Or, “You could try Finland, which is more equal, but it’s dark all day and they kill themselves.” Semi-polite conversation can devolve into, “I like you, Dot, but just fuck off please.”

The political import of Churchill’s plays is most often implied, employing forceful dramaturgy rather than speechifying to make her point; for example, using a young girl’s innocence to filter a dark reality in Far Away (2000). Her style can vary, as these four plays show. In Mad Forest (1990), co-written with a group of young Romanian performers, she might be said to have deviated by putting a fairly direct representation of the oppressive Romanian state under Nicolae Ceaușescu, though there were also vampires and other exotic figures. One much lauded earlier work, Top Girls (1982) was a nuanced pro-feminist argument that moved freely through history. In 2008, after the US had gone to war in Iraq, The Public hosted Churchill’s wondrous, 45-minute, fanciful political allegory Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, likening the US to a bad lover who draws his paramours—such as the UK—into disastrous wars around the globe.

Now back at The Public, and as always, Churchill’s peerless writing is not to be missed.