Oldal 82 [82]
OCR
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 highspiritedly 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 pseudoreality, 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. +81 +
