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SAMUEL BECKETT’S LEGACIES IN CARYL CHURCHILL’S LATER PLAYS
dystopian future: “a harrowing portrait of life after the nuclear holocaust
for the survivors.”?” When she foretells the nightmarish future, she escapes
from the tea and stands at the edge of the blackened stage surrounded by
two pulsing, electrified frames (at the Royal Court Theatre). It presents the
space inside her mind, which is filled with fear and anger about today’s global
destruction.
On the other hand, the conversation over tea sounds peaceful, and the
women overall look comfortable being together and chatting. Ihey even high¬
spiritedly sing a song (Ihe Crystals" "Da Doo Ron Ron") together in one of
the scenes. Iheir emotional mood, however, repeatedly shifts from high to
low in the course of the play, depending on their topics that change from
the trivial happenings in their families to a lament about the world today.
Besides Mrs Jarretts independent monologues, there are three long gloomy
soliloguies in which each of the other three women discloses her own trauma
only to the audience, when she is spotlighted in tableau with the others. What
is revealed from the soliloguies is that Sally is obsessed by her fear of cats,
so when she finds them around the house or even hears the word “cats,” she
is thrown into a panic; that Lena, who used to be a high-flying executive
in an office, has mental health problems and cannot go out even to shop at
the nearest Tesco; and that Vi, who was jailed for killing her husband and is
now released, cannot go into the kitchen and cook meat because it reminds
her of the moment she killed him. These inner soliloquies, in combination
with Mrs Jarrett’s incantation of “terrible rage” in the last scene, reveal these
women’s frustration and irritation against the male-dominated society of
today, just as other plays by Churchill do. They are “inundated with their
own individual problems as they struggle to keep their heads above water.”?’
This comment resonates with Beckett, who told his actors when he directed
Waiting for Godot at the Schiller Theater in 1975 to “imagine that Vladimir
and Estragon were in a boat with a hole in it. They pump it dry but then panic
as it begins immediately to fill up again and they have to resume pumping.
He also described them as taking part in ‘a game to stay alive’.”** Thus, the
characters of Churchill closely resemble Beckett’s two tramps; they are all
“survivors” who manage to “stay alive.”
However, in Beckett’s post-apocalyptic works such as Endgame and Happy
Days, the survivors are still struggling to hold on to their ordinary lives until
their fate of death arrives, and in that sense, their situations have a pseudo¬
reality, whereas the post-apocalyptic world Mrs Jarrett speaks to us about is
far from reality: as Paul Taylor describes, Churchill “pushes the result to a
26 Loveridge: London Review.
27 Dowden: Review.
28 Dougald McMillan — James Knowlson (eds.): The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett:
Waiting for Godot, New York, Grove, 1993, 105-106.
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