[In the following essay, Aston discusses the collaboration and research techniques Churchill employed while writing Fen, Serious Money, and Mad Forest.]

Research has always been important to Caryl Churchill's theatre-making. In prefaces, introductions, afterwords and interviews where she discusses her work, Churchill cites sources and publications which have helped to shape her drama, and, in this way, she permits the reader access to the thinking and making process of her work and ideas.¹ Additionally, she also acknowledges her debt to group work, with companies such as Monstrous Regiment and Joint Stock, as detailed in the previous two chapters, and to directors, designers, and so on, who have collaborated with her in the theatrical process.

Research and the sharing of ideas underpin the three plays studied in this chapter in a special kind of way: they are all projects which involved Churchill, and the company she was working with, in oral research with particular communities. The first of these, Fen (1983), was researched by Joint Stock out in a remote East Anglian fen village. Serious Money (1987) took Churchill and actors from the Royal Court into London's world of high finance, and Mad Forest (1990) involved her and students from the Central School of Speech and Drama in a field-trip to Romania to grapple with political upheaval in Eastern Europe. All three projects relied on meeting with and engaging in dialogue with people involved in each community, whether in East Anglia, London, or Bucharest.

“LAND-GIRLS”: FEN

In 1983, the year of Fen's production, Mary Chamberlain published a revised edition of her collection of interviews, Fenwomen, which documents the experiences of girlhood, schooling, marriage, work, religion, politics, recreation and ageing of women in a Fen village.² Churchill acknowledges her debt to this study (from which she took quotations for the “Girls' Song” in Scene Seven),³ but, like Chamberlain, she and Joint Stock, also conducted their own oral research. Through talking to people, the actors learned about the lives, the work, and the history of the Fen community. As Chamberlain explains, researching orally in this way, the representation of “people's words and memories” are “not the silent labours of a solitary archivist, but the result of a dialogue.”⁴ Moreover, she argues that researching oral history “offers the possibility of creating a democratic history in that it offers the means of expression for the past of the ‘common people’ and offers a participation in that process.”⁵Fen is “the result of a dialogue” with a community, and, arguably, demonstrates Churchill using theatre to stage “democratic history,” as she did in Light Shining in Buckinghamshire.

Churchill has described Fen as the “most documentary” of her Joint Stock projects,⁶ noting that “Fen is a play with more direct quotes of things people said to us than any other I've written” ([Plays: Two, hereafter cited as P2] ix). During the period of research, the actors would not record or write down what people said to them, but would go back to the company to present a person they had met to the group.⁷ Out of this material Churchill devised a cast of twenty-two characters originally shared between a company of six performers. Reviewing the production, Michelene Wandor criticized the researching and workshopping method for the way in which it was “reflected in the structure of the piece—a large number of characters representing as many different types of people as can be crammed in.”⁸ However, like Light Shining in Buckinghamshire or Vinegar Tom, as a representation of “democratic history” the emphasis in Fen is on the portrait of a collective rather than the individual; on the representation of a community of ordinary, oppressed people.

The community in Fen is largely, although not exclusively, represented by different generations of women who are shown working the land and looking after their homes and children. It is portrayed as a never-ending cycle of drudgery and oppression, passed on from generation to generation; from mothers to daughters. The monotony of the work cycle is imaged in Scene Two, for example, which shows the women working out in a potato field. Churchill's directions state that they work “in a row … When their buckets are full they tip the potatoes into a potato grave at the top of the field” (P2 148). The young women in the community may have their aspirations, as Churchill represents in the lyrics of the “Girls' Song,” but ultimately their dreams do not take them beyond the village which binds them to harsh work on the land, early marriages and child-rearing: “I want to be a nurse when I grow up / And I want to have children and get married. / But I don't think I'll leave the village when I grow up” (P2 157). The future for them, as for Angie in Top Girls, is “frightening.” It is through the theatricalization of the ordinary lives of the Fenwomen that the documentary style which Churchill argues for Fen is clearly illustrated. Compare Churchill's dramatic documentation, for example, with this brief extract from a factual account of “Everyday Life of the Fen”:

One of the factors is inherent to the fens and it is an attitude of fear; “better not step out of line or the employer will have me out.” This is obviously the result of many years hard work and exploitation. Also the fens are very much closed village communities with little opportunity for employment. Even if the girl does receive a decent education and is encouraged to take it seriously there will be very limited job opportunities at the end of it. Therefore the only way to get a good job is to move out of the area and again the fen attitude tends to want not to leave their home village and family.⁹

The cycle of oppression is reinforced in Fen by the central figure of Val, who attempts but fails to resist her social destiny. She tries to escape to London with her two daughters and her lover, Frank, but stays tied to the village, recognizing that they do not have the work skills to survive in the city. In order to be with Frank, Val has to give up her daughters. Scene Four, which shows her leaving the children, undercuts the transitory moment of happiness in a wordless Scene Five, in which Val and Frank are seen dancing together: “Old-fashioned, formal, romantic, happy” (P2 153). Romance was not something which, as Mary Chamberlain's research revealed, Fenwomen experienced as part of their lives:

Romance and glamour—the opium of women—had, they felt, passed the fen by. For life on the land is neither romantic nor glamorous. Just hard work, in uncompromising weather, in rough old working clothes padded out with newspaper against the wind. Small chance to catch a young man's fancy. Marriage for convenience or marriage to conform, particularly for the older women. Then back to the soil. Land worker, home servicer.¹⁰

When Val is shunned by her community for leaving her children in pursuit of romance and happiness, she takes refuge in religion, which turns out to be a farcical sham of sisterly bonding and comfort, and, ultimately, finding that she can neither live with Frank without her children, nor be with her children without Frank, she invites her lover to kill her as the only means of escaping.

Each time Val turns to women in her family or in her community of friends for help, they preach acceptance rather than resistance. As Shirley, a field-worker and fifty-year-old grandmother counsels, “You've too much time on your hands. You start thinking. Can't think when you're working in the field can you?” (P2 168). Women like Val, who want to change the oppressive patterning of their lives are seen as deviant, are represented as misfits by their community. Nell, for example, who is one of the few women to protest her rights as a worker (P2 150, 180), is taunted by the village girls for her “morphrodite” body (P2 155), and Shirley's rebellious granddaughter Sukey is singled out for comment because of her green hair. Val argues, “Sukey's a freak round here but if she went to a city she wouldn't be, not so much,” adding, “And I wouldn't” (P2 168).

Val, who doubles with the ghost of a nineteenth-century mother and farm-worker whose “baby died starving” (P2 163), and the generations of women dramatized alongside her, represent the silenced history of the Fenwomen. As one reviewer explained, “the mothers, daughters and granddaughters whose voices the play amplifies serve as a Greek chorus for a hitherto silent pageant of female emotion.”¹¹ The focus on the women as representative of the Fen community is significant because it is the women who are doubly oppressed, by their class and by their gender. The ties that bind them to the village, as Val discovers, are financial as well as familial. The double oppression of work and domesticity was visually represented in the set for the original production, for which designer Annie Smart created a field as the “floor” to both exterior and interior scenes. The presence of the flat, bleak, landscape of the fens further served as a visual counterpoint to the linguistic register of dreams, romance, and story-telling which the women use as a means of “escape,” illustrated, for example, in Angela's dream of living in the “romantic” rural landscape of the Lake District (P2 181), or Nell's diversionary tale of passion and murder (which prefigures Val's “murder”), narrated while the women pack onions into boxes (Scene Ten).

Class and gender oppression are also encoded in the ensemble style of playing which Churchill's text invites. The one male performer in the original Joint Stock production, who was assigned four character roles, had to play both the oppressed farm-worker and the landowning farmer, thereby marking the discourse of oppressor and oppressed on and through his body. This is highlighted in Scene Three when the actor playing Frank mimes working on a tractor as he carries on a dialogue with Tewson, the farmer: Frank argues in favour of higher wages, while the farmer argues against him. The split-subject dialogue is visually underlined in the gestural encoding of oppressor and oppressed as Frank hits Tewson, that is, “he hits himself across the face” (P2 151). Similarly, Scene Six stages an oppressor and oppressed relationship between a stepmother, Angela, and her stepdaughter, Becky. The violent nature of their relationship is gesturally represented by Angela forcing Becky to drink a cup of very hot water, while Angela taunts Becky about her absent, dead mother. The absence of the real mother, who signifies comfort and security, and the reality of the stepmother, who represents violence and danger, are gesturally marked in the dual movement from “good” to “bad” mother at the close of the scene, as “Angela strokes Becky's hair then yanks it” (P2 154).

A feel for the violence in the Fen community, and a history of violence in the Fens, such as the nineteenth-century food riots, came out of the oral research. Churchill noted that discontent in the community was the kind that turned itself into aimless violence, rather than being channelled in a political direction.¹²Fen illustrates the little impact which the political activities of the union, past and present, have had in improving the lives of ordinary workers. The recollections of Fenwoman Ivy on her ninetieth birthday narrate the generations of landowners in the Tewson family who intimidated the workers to try and prevent them joining the unions:

Fellow come round on his bike and made his speech in the empty street and everybody'd be in the house listening because they daren't go out because what old Tewson might say. “Vote for the blues, boys,” he'd say and he'd give them money to drink. They'd pull off the blue ribbons behind the hedge. Still have the drink though.

(P2 177–8)

In the present, scenes of the women working the fields for a nineteenth-century style of gangmaster, empowered to hire, fire and set the level of wages, demonstrate their exploitation and lack of job security or employment rights (Scenes Two and Twelve). By making the gangmaster a woman, Churchill demonstrates, as she does in Top Girls, that it is not just men who abuse women from a position of power. Exploitation is further underlined by the juxtaposition of, for example, Scene Two with Scene One which opens with a Japanese Businessman assigned a monologue detailing the history of capitalist investors in the fens. In the present, landowners like Tewson, selling out to city investors because of taxes on the land (see Scene Nine), perpetuate the history of the capitalist cycle of exploiters and exploited.

Val's “murder” at the close of the play marks a shift in register from sparse realism to a surreal discourse which links past and present suffering in a resistant vision of fen misery. Angela, who inflicts pain on Becky to anaesthetise her own misery is made to feel her own pain. Nell is seen striding out on stilts like her ancestors who rebelled against the draining of the Fens. Shirley, whose class and gender oppression is imaged in the sight of her ironing the field, remembers what it feels like to be unhappy. The boy from the last century who scares the crows crosses the landscape. Finally, Val's mother May, who would never sing because she could never fulfil her dream of becoming a singer, sings. This is not a utopian realization of her dream, but a recognition of missed opportunity, signalled in the closing Brechtian Gestus of May “stand[ing] as if singing,” as the spectator hears “what she would have liked to sing,” in the form, as Churchill notes for the original production, of “a short piece of opera on tape” (P2 145) The dislocation between the voice of the singer and the recorded song signifies the gap between harsh social reality and beautiful dream.

“MONEYSPEAK”: SERIOUS MONEY

While Fen focused on the rural working-class community in East Anglia, Serious Money looked at the rise of working-class money-makers in London's changing world of high finance. To research the project, Churchill, Max Stafford-Clark and performers from the Court “made daily observational forays to the trading floors and dealing rooms of the City,” and, as with Fen, the performers “then re-enacted their experiences … in an attempt to create a ‘work-study’ of a community.”¹³ This introduced them to the changing practices of the Stock Exchange, engaged them in dialogue with the new “barrow boy” traders, and taught them the new language of “serious moneyspeak,” “the current City slang.”¹⁴ As actress Linda Bassett commented, they met people, most of whom seemed to be aged about 23, who were earning between £40,000 and £50,000, when the performers were, at that time, working for a wage of about £130 a week.¹⁵ After the workshopping in the autumn of 1986, Churchill took the research away, spent several months engrossed in the Financial Times, before rehearsals and, finally, in March 1987, the production of her “City comedy” took place. Unlike Fen's sympathetic portrait of an oppressed community, Serious Money emerged as a satirical critique of the greed and corruption driving the London money markets, and, by implication and association, the Conservative government.

Serious Money is a complex and amoral web of wheeling and (insider) dealing, where the money-makers sacrifice relatives, family, friends, and relationships to make a profit. The dramatic narrative is woven out of two criss-crossing threads: the death (murder?) of commercial paper dealer Jake Todd, and the bid by Billy Corman to take over the company Albion Products. Solving the enigma of Jake's death is the task of his sister Scilla, a LIFFE (London International Financial Futures Exchange) dealer, but she quickly becomes more interested in finding out about how Jake was making enormous sums of “serious money,” and, most importantly, where his money is being held, so that she can claim it for herself. Ultimately the precise cause of Jake's death remains unsolved—although the involvement of the British government, MI5, or the CIA, is hinted at (P2 305).

Scilla's investigative drive connects the Albion bid to Jake as she retraces his life through his diary, which contains not events (there's no time for socializing unless business combines with pleasure), but commercial contacts. Through the banker Zackerman (Zac), who supports Corman's bid for Albion, she gets to Corman, and, finally, to the American arbitrageur (a money market speculator), MaryLou Baines. It is Jake's trading in information, enabling speculators like Baines to make their money, which has aroused the suspicions of the DTI—helped by a “phonecall from an embittered, old-fashioned stock exchange dealer, who is disillusioned with current trading ‘standards.” The DTI investigation is, possibly, connected in some way with Jake's death, which, in turn, makes the transatlantic money markets reverberate with fear. As Zac describes, Jake is “the kind of loose thread” that could make “the whole fucking city … unravel” (P2 256). (The same kind of fears arose in the 1990s when Nick Leeson's trading bankrupted Barings Bank and made the international money markets nervous.)

The action is condensed into the immediate aftermath of Jake's death, but mixing past and present is realized through flashback sequences, held together by Zac who functions as a narrative linking-device. Theatrically this demonstrates the corrupt money-making practices before and after the Big Bang deregulation of the Stock Exchange. As one critic described it, “we are in a predatory world where the clubby corruption of the old City is being replaced by the wolfish greed of the deregulated Eighties.”¹⁶ Moreover, Churchill opens her play with a scene from Thomas Shadwell's The Volunteers, or The Stock-Jobbers. The imaging of late-seventeenth-century trading among the mercantile classes, seeking to “turn the penny in the way of stockjobbing” (P2 196), provides a historical example which underscores Churchill's critique of capitalism. As Janelle Reinelt summarizes “the play's foundation, then, is the Brechtian historicization of finance.”¹⁷

Scilla and Jake are central not only to the dramatic organization of Serious Money, where Jake functions as an enigma and Scilla as investigator, but also to the play's class confrontation between the old boy network and the emergence of the “barrow boys” in the money markets. Brother and sister are marked by the discourses of both classes: by their property-owning, middle-to-upper-class family, and the class of “new market makers.” Jake is described by the uneducated dealer Grimes, who has one CSE in metalwork (P2 207), as “the only public schoolboy what can really deal,” which Jake claims is “because I didn't go to university and learn to think twice” (P2 205).

As a woman, Scilla has twice offended her familial class: firstly, by going out to work, and, secondly, by going to work without “being part of an old boy network” (P2 281). The warring class discourses are gesturally encoded in Scilla's dialogue precisely because she is a woman engaging in masculine power-and language-play. When, for example, Scilla insists that Zac call MaryLou Baines, so that she can finally make contact with the American speculator with a view to getting her hands on her brother's money, his surprise that she is not the “English rose” he thought she was, is met with, “go stick the thorns up your nose, bozo” (P2 295–6). And, when Scilla finally meets with MaryLou, she describes herself as a ruthless combination of having the “cunning and connections of the middle class,” while being as “tough as a yob” (P2 305). As the LIFFE scenes at the close of Act One illustrate, women like Scilla who join the money-makers work in a sexist profession, and surviving means speaking the same language. The women use the same “yob” language about the men as the men do about the women:

JOANNE:
Do you call him Dick because he's got spots?
JILL:
No, I call him Spot because he's a dick.

(P2 24)

The power-play between the “old boys” and the new “barrow boys” is linguistically marked throughout the play. When, for example, the chairman of Albion (England) is under threat from Corman's take-over bid, the “white knight” (someone who comes to the rescue of a company facing a hostile take-over bid) constructs an image of the company as a “good old English firm.” In an Arthurian discourse of knights rescuing maidens from villains, Albion (England) is positioned as the maiden and potential rape victim of the villain, Corman (P2 235). (The artifice of this strategy is, however, immediately exposed by the white knight's switch from Arthurian imagery to his pragmatic “we can talk about closing Scunthorpe later,” P2 235.)

Corman also represents the take-over bid as a sexual act, but not in Arthurian terms, rather as a rapacious act of “screwing.” “Sexy greedy is the late eighties,” argues the PR consultant trying to construct an image for Corman in his fight for Albion (P2 287). Screw others before they screw you is the ethos of the deregulated 1980s, and “moneyspeak” is a language trading in sexual obscenities. To make money is, as Ian Dury's lyrics to the song which brings Act One to a close state, to “do the fucking business” (P2 253). Moreover, “Do[ing] the fucking business” leaves no time for the “business of fucking,” as comically illustrated in the inability of Zac and Jacinta Condor (a Peruvian business woman) in the second act, to find a “window” for pleasure (sex).

Traders no longer buy and sell products, but deal in one commodity: money. As Scilla explains in a direct address to the audience: “You can buy and sell money, you can buy and sell absence of / money, debt, which used to strike me as funny” (P2 244). For economically deprived countries, the act of trading or speaking money is also an act of colonization as Western money markets profit at the expense of the Third World economy. Churchill demonstrates this in the representation of Jacinta, who is both colonized and colonizer. Coming from Peru, she belongs to a country of the oppressed, but money empowers her to colonize by trading in and with the West at the expense of her own nation. As her accomplice, Nigel Abjibala, states: “One thing one learned from one's colonial masters, / One makes money from other people's disasters” (P2 261). When researching the City, Churchill described how “one of the actors … from St. Kitts, was astonished to see that the price of sugar, so important to his country's economy, was determined by what happened in a small room between a few listless young men.” She added, “that was one of the moments when we could connect what we saw in the City with the world outside.”¹⁸

Moreover, the colonizing impulse may be read as underpinning the ethos of the corrupt international money markets. Churchill resists any suggestion that the displaced old boys network was somehow morally better than the thoroughly amoral class of new marketeers. All of the characters in her dramatization of the world of high finance are dissolute and espouse the creed of “do others before they can do you” (P2 305). It is the spectator who is positioned as the only potentially moral agent in the performance frame; who is invited through the Brechtian mode of address to cast a critical eye over the world of high finance.

However, reviewers noted that “despite her [Churchill's] stern intentions, she makes the buccaneering atmosphere of the City seem rather attractive.”¹⁹ Peter Lewis, commenting on the audiences at the Royal Court production, observed that “at least two City firms booked the entire theatre to take their staff on a kind of Yuppie works outing.”²⁰ After the transfer to Wyndham's, Jeremy Kingston noted that “the show's popularity among exactly the people it set out to condemn is one of its more intriguing features,” adding that it was “rather as though coachloads of Venetian Jews had driven up to applaud Mr Shakespeare's play about a vengeful Jewish usurer.”²¹ Reported comments from City spectators seemed to indicate that they found it “very true to life.”²² In short, the verve of Churchill's writing combined with the high-energy mode of Joint Stock's physical performance style of ensemble playing enabled the spectator to experience the adrenalin, but not always, it would appear, her satirical view of the money market.

Drama scholar Ruby Cohn, while praising the “demonic energy” of Serious Money, blames this failing on Churchill's use of verse, arguing that she finds the play “hard … to take seriously as satire,” because “the energetic rhymes pound home the repetitive quality of corruption, unredeemed by any direct or honest statement.”²³ However, this overlooks the way in which Churchill's satirical purpose is clearly signalled in her verse, which she creates out of City slang and obscene “moneyspeak,” alien to the non-City spectator. The programme for the Wyndham's production, for example, included explanations of City scandals and glossaries of the City slang. While those inside the markets may easily read the signs encoded in the different coloured blazers (uniforms) of the traders and understand the language of “moneyspeak,” the non-City spectator is alienated by visual and linguistic sign-systems; is positioned as “outsider,” as critical observer.

Rather, audience reactions to Serious Money demonstrate that the dramatist—like the semiotician Pierre in Softcops—cannot “fix” meaning or determine audience response. It further references the complex role of the spectator in the reception process; the spectator as active and acting participant in the production of meaning. If the spectator shares in the ethos of greed and corruption encoded in the performance text, she/he may engage in the pleasure of identification, refusing to “see” the signs which position her or him as the satirical subject. For example, Ian Dury's second song which closes the play, “Five More Glorious Years,” critiques the 1987 Conservative re-election, heralding a possible further five years of greed and corruption. But the critique may not be “heard” by those for whom Thatcher's re-election was a cause for celebration; who delighted in the prospect of being “pissed and promiscuous,” earning “ridiculous” money for another five years (P2 308). Ironically, however, if Churchill's socialist critique was overturned in one way, it was served in another: the pleasuring of right-wing City audiences helped to make “serious money” for left-wing theatre.²⁴

‘TWO WEDDINGS AND A REVOLUTION’: MAD FOREST

Political systems of power and oppression constitute a dominant motif in Mad Forest, Churchill's dramatization of the 1989 Romanian revolution. Having worked with Churchill for Joint Stock, the then artistic director of Central, Mark Wing-Davey, proposed a Joint Stock Style of workshopping for this East European project. This resulted in taking British drama students out to Bucharest to stay with the families of Romanian students with whom they worked and researched. Again, much of the research for Mad Forest was conducted out on the street, talking to ordinary Romanian people.²⁵ For Churchill, taking students out to Romania to research this project was a way of “working away from the mainstream” with young people who were “the same age as the people who made the revolution.”²⁶

The research trip to Romania took place just a few months after the fall of Ceausescu in December 1989, and therefore at a moment of post-revolutionary chaos as Romanian citizens were trying to take stock of what had happened and what the future held for them. While Churchill worked on Mad Forest for its production in June 1990, Romania was struggling to come to terms with the election of Illiescu and the National Salvation Front, associated with the old Ceausescu regime, and, as the play opened, students were again being subjected to violence as miners in Bucharest were brought in to crush anti-Front protesters. Some reviewers were critical of Mad Forest for failing to tackle this latest twist in events, although it is difficult to see how theatre can keep pace with the real life drama of events. Reviewer Benedict Nightingale offered a practical piece of advice: “Churchill should keep Mad Forest in her word-processor, ready to up-date, revise. It could become one of her most striking plays.”²⁷

Nightingale also had praise for the way in which the “unfinished feel” of Mad Forest succeeded in capturing the real-life chaos of revolution and history in the making. The “unfinished feel” is created through the dramatization of fragments from the lives of ordinary people—orally researched by the cast—from before, during and after the revolution. Two weddings frame this three-part structure, situated either side of the second, middle section which represents the revolution of December 1989. The first and third sections trace the lives of two families, one working class (the Vladu family) and one middle class (the Antonescu family), and the ways in which their lives are conditioned by the oppressive Ceausescu regime and post-liberation disorder. The Vladu family are especially affected in the opening section by the marriage of their daughter Lucia, to an American—a “betrayal” which places the whole family under the surveillance of the secret police. Further tensions arise from this wedding, which concludes the first section, as it makes it difficult for the cross-class marriage between Lucia's sister Florina, and Radu, from the Antonescu family, to take place. The revolution is what makes the second wedding possible.

Where Serious Money uses the City language of “moneyspeak” to drive the action on, Mad Forest shows people afraid to communicate, to act through speaking In Part One, revolution can only be whispered in meat-buying queues ([Mad Forest, hereafter cited as MF] 17), or joked about in low voices among trusted friends (MF 20–21). As people are afraid of how their own words might be used against them, familial conversation is either silenced or conducted only when the radio is turned up loud (MF 13). Bogdan's protest over the prospect of his daughter marrying an American is enacted visually rather than verbally: he smashes one of four eggs which Lucia offers to her family with her American cigarettes (MF 13). (The egg is quickly salvaged by Bogdan's wife, Irina. It is too precious to waste.) Public speech is reserved for the praise of Ceausescu, as illustrated in the teacher, Flavia Antonescu, addressing her pupils in a monologue on the merits of the president (MF 16). Privately, however, a dialogue between Flavia and her dead grandmother, reveals the numbness she feels at living a lie; living a life that “nobody's living” (MF 26). That Flavia's thoughts and feelings are shared with a figure who is already dead underlines the risks of speaking openly with the living. Similarly, a priest, seeking comfort from the danger of talking, holds a conversation with an Angel:

This is so sweet, like looking at the colour blue, like looking at the sky when you're a child lying on your back, you stare out at the blue but you're going in, further and further in away from the world, that's what it's like knowing I can talk to you. Someone says something, you say something back, you're called to a police station, that happened to my brother. So it's not safe to go out to people and when you can't go out sometimes you find you can't go in, I'm afraid to go inside myself, perhaps there's nothing there, I just keep still. But I can talk to you, no one's ever known an angel work for the Securitate.

(MF 21)

The gap or contradiction between what is said and what is unspoken is demonstrated in a scene in which Lucia asks a doctor for an abortion. The dialogue involves Lucia making her request and the doctor refusing her request, but, at the same time, they carry on a silent exchange of words (on paper) during which the abortion is agreed to and paid for:

DOCTOR:
There is no abortion in Romania. I am shocked that you even think of it. I am appalled that you dare suggest I might commit this crime.
LUCIA:
Yes, I'm sorry.
Lucia gives the doctor an envelope thick with money and some more money.
DOCTOR:
Can you get married?
LUCIA:
Yes.
DOCTOR:
Good. Get married.
The Doctor writes again, Lucia nods.
DOCTOR:
I can do nothing for you. Goodbye.
Lucia smiles. She makes her face serious again.
LUCIA:
Goodbye.

(MF 19)

As Janelle Reinelt explains, “these different Brechtian gests of talking (or not) enable the relationship between communication and ideology to become visible.”²⁸

The Brechtian style of Mad Forest is structurally encoded in the three-part montage of scenes, captioned with titles announced in Romanian and English. As Churchill instructs that a performer reads these titles in the manner of an English tourist using a Romanian phrase book (MF 13), the difficulty of expression is again underlined. In Part Two, one is forcefully reminded of Brecht's revolutionary street scene in The Mother. Here, using a technique which recalls the multiple role-switching in Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, which Churchill used to portray the chaos of a (potentially) revolutionary moment, the performers break with their character roles from Part One to represent different Romanian citizens caught up in the December upheaval from “order” to “unorder.” The performers were instructed for this section to play their parts in the manner of Romanians speaking with English accents. This technique gave “a startlingly vivid sense of real events being recalled in the immediate aftermath.”²⁹ In contrast to Part One, where language has lost its performative function, in Part Two, the revolution is performed through speaking. This was underlined by keeping the performers physically still on stage, posed “as if for a group photograph,” rather than using the revolutionary section of the play as “an obvious chance for characters to rush around the stage waving flags with holes cut out of them.”³⁰

A surreal scene between a vampire and a dog opens the third part, imaging Romania as the poor, starving, ownerless, dog, missing the hated master and looking to the Vampire as a new blood-sucking owner. As the revolution releases the Romanian citizens into speech, confusion and tensions begin to surface. Parents and children are divided over support of new political parties, specifically over whether to be pro- or anti-Front, and racism towards the Hungarians is a source of heated familial debate. Where Lucia created tension in Part One through her marriage to an American, she causes upset in Part Three through the renewal of her relationship with a Hungarian lover. New political “freedoms” bring new oppressions as citizens like Flavia, who kept their jobs under the old regime, now find their positions at risk. In the hospital where Gabriel Vladu, treated as a wounded hero of the revolution, recuperates, a disorientated patient, representative of post-revolution confusion, wanders the wards asking what had really happened: “Did we have a revolution or a putsch?” (MF 50)—a line which was greeted with applause when the play was performed in Bucharest.³¹

The re-enactment of the revolution is a theatrical device which Churchill uses in Part Three to dramatize the questions and uncertainties which the Romanians need to express. The wedding couple, Florina and Radu, role-play the execution of the Ceausescus, a sequence which releases hatred, sexism and racism (MF 68–71). The wedding, which Flavia compares to the revolution where “everyone laughs and cries” and goes “back behind their masks” (MF 74), re-enacts the before, during and after moments of the revolution, as the polite, public “masks” are shattered by outbreaks of verbal and physical violence, followed by a silent dance—a ritualized moment of enforced social harmony, which gives way to a renewed linguistic outbreak (in Romanian) of political and social discontents. Churchill uses the high-energy technique of overlapping voices, as she did in Serious Money, to demonstrate the passionate and violent release into “freedom” which the revolution brings. She assigns the final lines of Mad Forest to the figure of the blood-sucking Vampire who haunts the wedding dance, and instructs that his last few words should be heard alone: “You begin to want blood. Your limbs ache, your head burns, you have to keep moving faster and faster” (MF 87).

Post-revolutionary “freedom” offers new possibilities, but like the post-murder release of pain and suffering in Fen, or the post-election chorus of “five fucking morious” years of Tory corruption in Serious Money, the future for the Romanian people, trying to find their way through the “Mad (political) Forest” is also “frightening.”

Notes

1. See Select Bibliography, “Source material for plays,” for details of sources relating to certain of the plays studied in this volume.

2. Mary Chamberlain, Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village (1975; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).

3. See Chamberlain, 112–14.

4. Ibid., 3.

5. Ibid., 2–3.

6. Omnibus, BBC1, November 1988.

7. Explained by the director of Fen, Les Waters, ibid.

8. Plays and Players, October 1983, 39–40; 40.

9. Liz Bale, “Everyday Life,” Spare Rib, July 1984, 50–3; 52.

10. Chamberlain, 11–12.

11. Beverly Hayne, Sunday Times Magazine, 24 July 1983, 31.

12. Omnibus, BBC1, November 1988.

13. Peter Lewis, The Times, 30 June 1987, 9.

14. Explained in the programme notes for the West End, Wyndham's production.

15. The Times, 30 June 1987, 9.

16. John Peter, Sunday Times, 29 March 1987, 51.

17. Janelle Reinelt, After Brecht, 97.

18. Churchill, “Driven by Greed and Fear,” New Statesman, 17 July 1987, 10–11; 10.

19. Clare Colvin, Plays and Players, May 1987, 14.

20. The Times, 30 June 1987, 9.

21. The Times, 7 July 1987, 18.

22. The Times, 30 June 1987, 9.

23. Ruby Cohn, Retreats from Realism in Recent English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 91.

24. Serious Money made £14,000 a week for the Royal Court, which generated the funds for the West End transfer to Wyndham's. See The Times, 30 June 1987, 9. It is Cloud Nine, however, which is reported to be Churchill's “biggest earner.” See Claire Armistead, “Tale of the Unexpected,” Guardian, Section 2, Arts, 12 January 1994, 4–5; 5.

25. Details explained by Reva Klein in Times Education Supplement, 29 June 1990, 35.

26. Jim Hiley interview, The Times, 10 October 1990, 25

27. The Times, 26 June 1990, 18.

28. Janelle Reinelt, After Brecht, 103.

29. Jeremy Kingston, The Times, 11 October 1990, 26.

30. Ibid.

31. The Times, 10 October 1990, 25.