Seite 86 [86]
SAMUEL BECKETT’S LEGACIES IN CARYL CHURCHILL’S LATER PLAYS
look like normal exchanges, something ominous is hidden. They lament that
the shops in the street are now gone or that British money has changed into the
decimal system. The good old days are gone, and now what is left to them? Each
of the four women has been traumatized not just by her personal experience
in the past, but also by her fear for the future of society and even of the earth.
They are, in that sense, all suffering from pre-traumatic syndrome related to
the annihilation of humanity and the death of the earth that might occur in
the future.
In fact, Mrs Jarrett’s last description of the earth which turned into a
“blackened area” with “zero population, zero growth and zero politics”
reminds us of the “ground zero” which connotes both Hiroshima, a nuclear
holocaust, and 9/11 in New York City. In Far Away, Churchill ends the
play with the most fearful thing being “the weather” that is “on the side of
the Japanese.”*° How ironic does this line sound? Hiroshima had beautiful
weather on the day when the A-bomb was dropped, and the weather was on
the side of the American Army. Looking at the blue sky, people in Hiroshima
felt bukimi. In both plays, Churchill makes the audience associate pre¬
traumatic syndrome with the post-traumatic experience known as a nuclear
catastrophe. And her “egalitarian and ethical rhythms of human-to-human
and human-to-non-human existence”®*! is the legacy of Beckett, whose post¬
war works reveal the most vulnerable human beings who manage to survive
in the end of the world, whether it is a nuclear holocaust or the earth which
has been reduced to environmental devastation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADOoRNO, Theodor W.: 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, 1958, 82-114.
ALLEREE, Claire: Escaped Alone, Royal Court, review: ‘terrific cast with nowhere
to go’, The Telegraph, 29 January 2016, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/
what-to-see/escaped-alone-royal-court-review-terrific-cast-with-nowhere¬
to-go/.
ASTON, Elaine: Caryl Churchill’s “Dark Ecology,” in Carl Lavery — Clare Finburgh
(eds.): Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, the Environment and
the Greening of the Modern Stage, London, Bloomsbury, 2015, 59-76.
CHURCHILL, Caryl: Escaped Alone, London, Nick Hern Books, 2016.
CHURCHILL, Caryl: Here We Go, London, Nick Hern Books, 2015.
* Churchill: Escaped Alone, 37.
50 Churchill: Far Away, New York, Theatre Communication Group, 2000, 43.
51 Aston: “Dark Ecology,” 75.