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SAMUEL BECKETT’S LEGACIES IN CARYL CHURCHILL'S LATER PLAYS —to> 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 sociopolitical 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.
