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SAMUEL BECKETT’S LEGACIES
IN CARYL CHURCHILL'S LATER PLAYS
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MARIKO HORI TANAKA
ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the post-traumatic subjects in Caryl Churchill’s
later plays that foreshadow apocalyptic catastrophes. Reflecting the legacy
of Samuel Beckett, Churchill’s plays are set in a post-World War II socio¬
political reality where her characters are trapped in traumatic conditions,
and their schizophrenic speech expresses a mad dystopia. Particularly in
her recent plays such as Here We Go (2015) and Escaped Alone (2016), her
characters seldom speak full sentences, and their lines are more fragmentary
than ever. Pauses and silences dominate their conversations. They, like the
tramps in Waiting for Godot, are compelled to speak or say something, as if
words or language games can fill the silence or the void. From such traumatic
language arises not just the post-traumatic condition of living in the present
socio-political reality, but also the “pre-traumatic syndrome” of the future
annihilation of human beings and the death of the earth.
THE HORROR OF SOCIO-POLITICAL REALITY
Theodor Adorno, in his analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, explains
that the play alludes to “the end of the world”! he and his contemporaries
experienced after the Second World War where “everything, including a
resurrected culture, was destroyed, although without its knowledge. In the
wake of events which even the survivors cannot survive, mankind vegetates,
crawling forward on a pile of rubble, denied even the awareness of its own
ruin." Beckett reminds us of the possible annihilation of the human species
and destruction of the earth, which we usually repress and ignore. Revealing
such repressed horror in us in the unique style of comic irony is the very
feature that is explored today by Caryl Churchill.
! Theodor W. Adorno: Towards an Understanding of Endgame, in Bell Gale Chevigny (ed.):
Twentieth Century Interpretations of Endgame: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1969, 86.
2 Ibid., 85.