Caryl Churchill: My reflection on What If If Only, death and the multiverse

• Reflections on seeing the latest Caryl Churchill play, What If If Only

• I view Churchill as one of our greatest playwrights

• My thoughts cross through the multiverse and death

• Passing through children, Tyler Cowen and OpenSpace participatory meetings

Death is on my mind.  So is the multiverse. 

Death is on my mind as I recently talked to Clare Montagu about what it is like to run a hospice through COVID.*

How we should speak plainly on death. 

Death is on my mind as Anoushka has reflected that death has challenged the thinking of my autistic 12 year old son* and my youngest questioned death early.

Death is on my mind as my latest performance piece is about How We Die.*

Death seems to be on the mind of SOMEONE in Caryl Churchill’s play, What If If Only. 

Even more than death the play asks What If … ? 

This is a question humans ask ourselves. 

My 9 year old embodies this when asking and debating the multiverse 

What if What if What if  …? 

It’s not only the Marvel superhero multiverse (and the recent series What If… straiing the Watcher). Consequentialist philosophers and the like think through the implications of What Ifs. The small changes that might mean, for instance, Hitler was never born. Before the big splashy Marvel multiverse, we had Sliding Doors in popular culture. A 1998 film that might have escaped today’s 20 somethings, but probably not Churchill.

This fantasy and science fiction tends to teach to be wary of tampering the timeline.

A podcast host, Auren Hoffman, asks* in the year 2021

…what advice do you wish you could have told your younger self?

Tyler Cowen answers 

That when I get to be older, don't give me any advice. Because look, for me, things have gone pretty well. So there's always the risk with advice. Even if you make a local improvement, you'll screw up the global path. Things have gone well, of course, you could have done better. But again, type one and type two error. Let's let that one sit. So no advice.

…advice is dangerous, how well can you predict other people's paths? Advice maybe is overrated. 

I think a lot of advice is a placebo. The person asks for advice because they want the feeling they've done everything possible, before doing what they're going to do anyway. No, I don't mind that. But once you realize that it's like advice, I don't necessarily think advice is advice, it’s helping the person process their own mental and emotional state.

SOMEONE meditates on death - whines morosely - and conjures  the FUTURE. 

The FUTURE declares  

I’m a ghost of a dead future

… 

Dont Dont Dont let them all in. Of course there's so many so many features that didn't happen like drops of rain grains of sand atoms in your heart. You’ll have no peace if they all come after you and I'm the best I'm a brilliant Future and I could easily have happened but stupid stupid caps choosing the wrong things and let me die. I'm a future you'd really like, everyone would have like me if I happened. 

SOMEONE  Because you're what?

Equality and cake and no bad bits at all and I've been glimpsed I've been died for in China and Russia and South America and here here in little country's history long ago people wanted me they want me over and over and forty fifty years ago I had friends I really nearly and my enemy say I'm utopia and nowhere place and I'm not I needn't be perfect but better better than what and I never happened and if I had happened this nasty desk wouldn't have I'm the one why wouldn't I promise and you've got to make me real you got to make me a real live 

In calling to the dead, SOMEONE is activating the problems of the multiverse

Of wishful thinking. 

Aside. Note Churchill’s use of words. Not the extreme truncation of certain previous works. No “ / “ notation. But a careful use of punctuation, repetition - poetic - in that condensed use of language, words and sound.  This gives a hint on the page of how an actor transforms this.

In Top Girls, Churchill poses questions on the role of women through history. 

In Serious Money, Churchill satires finance and our relationship with money. 

In A Number, she provokes on identity, genetics and cloning.

In Blue Heart the very form of the play speaks to the impossibility of completion and understanding.

Churchill takes human concepts and ideas and embodies them in theatre.

For me (I supposed I can only speak for me,and then am I even sure?)  What If If Only meditates on death, crosses the multiverse and ends up

With PRESENT and FUTURE with SOMEONE stuck not quite letting go of the past 

“gone but I can’t quite stop talking to you yet”

Says SOMEONE in the second last speech in the play. 

As the CHILD FUTURE declares 

I’m going to happen. 

In an Open Space meeting we are guided*

Whoever comes are the right people.

Wherever it happens is the right place.

Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.

Whenever it starts is the right time.

When it is over, it is over.

I’m left with this reflection

When it comes to death and what ifs

Speak plainly and let go. 

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Lukowshi writes in TimeOut:

But what does it mean? Clarity is never a given with Churchill, but in some ways ‘What If If Only’ is fairly straightforward: it’s about feeling somebody’s absence so profoundly that it warps your sense of reality, and it’s about reality answering back. It’s a fever-dream morality tale about the dangers of daring to challenge the absurdity of the universe.

Or it could mean something else entirely. But to unduly worry about explaining Churchill – who has never given an interview about her plays – is to perhaps miss the point. Her work operates at a low frequency – visceral, emotional, gut-level – and a high one – abstract, cerebral, unknowable. The space between, where most drama lives, simply doesn’t interest her. Long-term collaborator James McDonald’s production is moving, cryptic, funny, terrifying and ridiculous. There is nobody like Caryl Churchill and it’s hard to think of any writer in history so completely on top of their game at her age. It’s just 20 minutes, but it contains whole worlds.

Although Clive Davis for the Times was thoroughly confused.

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*On running a hospice: https://www.thendobetter.com/arts/2021/10/3/clare-montagu-running-a-hospice-during-the-pandemic-how-to-die-well-and-being-a-special-advisor-to-government

*Our children thinking on death: https://spitting-yarn.com/blog/2021/10/1/the-audacity-of-death

*Open Space: https://www.devotedanddisgruntled.com/about-open-space-technology

*My performance piece on death (and climate):  https://www.thendobetter.com/thinking-bigly

*Auren and Tyler on podcast(mostly on organisational capital: https://www.safegraph.com/podcasts/tyler-cowen-identifying-talent-measuring-organizational-capital

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Running at the Royal Court, London. Until 23 Oct. 6pm and 10pm, 20 minutes run time.

Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp. Caryl Churchill. Reflections.

It’s fair to say there is quite a lot I don’t comprehend about Carly Churchill’s latest four plays. 

I consider her one of  the greatest - if not the greatest living British playwright - so I place it more in myself that I don’t understand.

A few reflections:

The incomprehension seems to be a reflection of where we are in Britain. To me, Churchill has written of the times we are in and reflected that lens - often through a socio-political lens and typically feminist and socialist. 

The actors are serious. Their words and intentions seem serious to me. Their execution is exquisite.

There is a fragility present. A fragility embodied in the first play Glass and continuing through out. The fragility is direct in Glass from the moment you figure out the conceit of what the actors

are playing until the shattering end.

“There should be no attempt to make the glass girl look as if she is made of glass. No effort making her seem invisible etc. She looks like people look.” (Stage direction)

This seems an instruction that suggests directly the fragility of humans. 

In earlier works the incomprehension was embodied in form. Half sentences. Metaphors.

Here the confusion and fragility is more direct in both character and story. Bluebeard. Friends of Bluebeard seemingly can’t comprehend what Bluebeard has done and yet they are a mix of complicit, contradictory, supportive and excommunicatative - as in would preach an excommunication of friendship. 

What friend hasn’t done a bad thing? 

But what does it mean to be almost complicit in misogyny and murders.  We should have known. All of us. (Cf. MeToo) 

Kill.  Places the gods amongst us. I can’t figure out humans.  I definitely can’t figure out gods. Neither can anyone else. Does it reflect the fragility of humanity ? Our need for stories, myths both the mundane and the divine. 

The interludes have a juggler and a form of clowning mildly acrobatic contortionist. 

I’ve juggled probably a few hundred hours in my life.  4 clubs is hard. She has a fifth but after a couple of drops I didn’t see her take it on. Shame as I expect it would have been breath taking. 

It reinforces the fragility of life, a little nudge here or there - a slight over and under spin and boom it drops on the floor in a splat. 

The audience is generous. We’ve all been there before. 

Imp. This is a concentrated piece of life.  Lies. Or not. Fantasy. Hopes. Dreams. 

The older woman - Dot -  is always in her chair. She’s full of rage that she keeps bottled in. Once she let it out - it ruined her life.  Once a nurse she now lives on medications and benefits. She keeps a magical imp in a bottle. It may or it may not exist. 

The older man needs to run constantly to keep his depression at bay.  Related to the woman, they co-exist in a way that reminds me of early Pinter or Beckett.  It’s absurd in that the reality seems so concentrated. 

Their niece has arrived in town and drops in for regular visits. 

A semi-vagrant somewhat nomadic man drops in for tea. 

A story that reflects an atomised city living tangentially commenting on addiction, work, benefits, rage, the lies we tell ourselves, secrets we keep or don’t, the nature of love

And still a fragility and a reflection on who we are. 

Is it clear to me ? No.  But the tangled threads reflects how I don’t understand a lot of what I see around me. That feels true to me. 

A complex work with no easy classical dramaturgy by a writer who has written an astonishing body of work.  That’s important as well in a world looking for simple easy answers this set of work defies that.  

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Want more? This is Churchill’s agent - Mel Kenyon in conversation

Top Girls

There are strands of theatre which are conscious of the world they play in.

Some may argue that all theatre always reflects the wider world or at least the wider world reflects back on the theatre.

On occasion, I wonder how close the world pays attention. In a week where the National Theatre is criticised for its lack of female playwrights, I’m unsure how much the outside world observes.

That’s an  argument - all the more - for our national theatres to pay attention to the world and tell us the truths we are wilfully blind too.

Top Girls then forcefully reminds us. Reminds us of the subjugated role of women in history. Reminds us of the socio-political clash that brought Thatcher’s 80s and one woman’s cry “I don’t believe in class.” And how that worship of the individual has now played out.

That an all female cast written in a politics of over 30 years ago still has fresh resonance in an age of MeToo, identity wars and a politics which echoes and rhymes and seems to again reflect today.

A structure that spans dinner with almost mythical historical women to a kitchen sink in the early 1980s.

Our best theatre can leave you thinking or being something different at the end to at the beginning.