Oldal 86 [86]
OCR
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 pretraumatic 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 postwar 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-nowhereto-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.
