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by
BBC South Yorkshire contributor Ali Davies |
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The
perfect play should challenge your psyche and take you out of yourself,
leaving you in a daze of emotion.
This is exactly what Caryl Churchill's plays do, and the Crucible
showed three of her plays - Cloud Nine (Crucible) and Fen / Far
Away (studio) as part of a Caryl Churchill season.
Churchill
(not he of fighting on beaches and cigar fame) had her first play
performed in 1958 at the age of 20.
But it was in the late '70s that she found fame with the plays Cloud
Nine and Top Girls. Her acerbic wit and hilarious characters are
both unique and unforgettable; whose conversations have the audience
in stitches.
Cloud
Nine
Cloud
Nine (directed by Anna Mackmin who directed the recent production
of The Crucible) is a play of two very distinct halves.
The first half is set in a Victorian Colonial Africa, with plenty
of stiff upper lips hiding some deeper, darker and more passionate
emotions, revealing not so much love triangles but love nonagons.
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| Daniel
Evans as Betty in Cloud Nine |
Uncle
Harry loves Betty, the mother, has had 'interludes' with Edward,
the son, kisses Clive, the husband and finally marries the lesbian
governess.
In
the second half we see some of the same characters, one generation
on. Edward is grown up and we are transported to a more sexually
relaxed 1970s London.
With some of the same characters appearing as ghosts, it reminds
the audience of characters and their previous subdued lives.
The
play works on a hundred levels, it challenges sexual, political
and racial issues and reveals the darker side to British colonial
life. But ultimately it is blooming good laugh.
Churchill
knows the exact balance between pathos and hilarity with some fantastic
character acting.
Particularly from Paul Ritter who played both an emotional major
and an over-excited seven-year-old girl, and Lucy Briers as the
repressed wife then the liberated grandmother.
Fen
Fen
(directed by Simon Cox) is set in a field of potatoes, in the Norfolk
Fens, focussing on the lives of local community and the conversations
they have.
And this is what Churchill does best, conversation, down to earth
natters that include razor sharp comic delivery.
Far
Away (also directed by Simon Cox) is one of her later plays and
is an apocalyptic vision of a world at war with itself.
-
Ali Davies
Local theatre groups can add their production listings here!
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