[In the following mixed review of Hotel, a coupling of Churchill's two short plays Eight Rooms and Two Nights, Gee applauds the seamless and imaginative Eight Rooms, but describes Two Nights as confusing and disorganized.]

Caryl Churchill is Britain's best known living female playwright, author of two plays which helped define the hard edge of the 1980s, Top Girls and Serious Money. 1997 has already seen revivals of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and of the ground-breaking 1979 gender comedy Cloud Nine; this month, her new “dance-opera,” with music by Orlando Gough and choreography by Ian Spink, has opened in Hanover and in London, performed by Second Stride.

Hotel consists of two loosely linked pieces, Eight Rooms and Two Nights. Eight Rooms is a light opera with choreographed movement; Two Nights concentrates more on dance and is much grimmer in tone; the same trio of musicians, piano duettists and double bass, play stage-left in both. Both pieces feature books—in the first, a work of ornithology, Birds As Individuals, in the second, a diary left behind in a hotel room—as isolated objects from which elaborate communal dreams can unfold, just as Churchill's texts are transformed by musical collaboration and performances.

In Eight Rooms, Churchill shows, as she did in Top Girls and Cloud Nine, her gift for inventing non-naturalistic techniques that are genuinely effective on stage. The eight imaginary hotel rooms, with their eight different sets of inhabitants, are superimposed on one literal space, the invisible boundaries between them made physically real to the audience by the carefully interwoven yet insulated actions of the performers, who are oblivious to any room but their own. Thanks to Ian Spink's beautifully paced direction and the stark elegance of Lucy Bevan's Mondrian-inspired set, this never becomes confusing. The cheerful, solitary businessman ritualistically phoning home (“big kiss, bye-bye”) is obviously a world away from the tortured, tender, adulterous lovers unable to sleep at his feet.

The action of Eight Rooms lasts from early evening until morning. Fifteen guests arrive—a robust, optimistic elderly French couple on holiday, two gay women not quite decided whether or not to make love, an American tourist vacuously happy about the view, a single woman lost in her bird book, an explosively drunk and quarrelsome man and woman in evening dress—to enact various small dramas of sexual love or strife or hope for tomorrow, subsiding at last into a night of fitful sleep and dream.

The opera succeeds because of its amalgam of imaginative freedom and minute realism. Bold coups de théâtre, like the decision to make everyone stand on the furniture to sing their dreams, are underpinned by countless believable details of grooming, tooth-brushing, washing, and so on. Men shuffle about “unobserved” with genitals dangling under their shirts; a silver-frocked, champagne-swilling woman persistently spoils the effect by scratching her buttock.

Thus exposed, these people are comic and touching in their littleness. Their isolation is both emphasized and transcended by the communal staging of their separate dramas. Strangers echo each other or briefly sing together, in ignorance of each other's existence but brought closer for a second by the same small currents of loneliness or love, fear or boredom. The predominant mood is one of swift, affectionate light comedy, and the sour-sweet jazz score is pleasantly memorable—a distant relative of Sondheim's A Little Night Music. Into this pool of dreamy swimmers, a cold pebble falls with the little death of the early hours. A “Ghost,” sung with perplexed intentness by Angela Elliott, wanders among the sleepers, unsure of who she is, beginning the long process of forgetting why she clings to the living: “I've been dead so long / I've forgotten why / I've not gone away. …” Elliott has a powerfully disturbing, Lotte Lenya-esque presence, and the chilly intrusion of mortality into the amnesiac shallows of life is deeply affecting.

Two Nights is shorter, but seems longer. The company sing, this time in unison, to keening, Messiaen-influenced music, the contents of an abandoned diary, while a male and female dancer portray various kinds of self-destruction: slashed wrists, a gun, pills, sexual humiliation. Churchill says she found some of the narrative elements by trawling the Internet, and the end result is cryptic and unfocussed, despite a strong performance from Mike Poole. Orlando Gough describes Two Nights as “a companion for Eight Rooms—not necessarily a friend.” In fact, Eight Rooms could perfectly well stand alone. It is a small classic which opens up new possibilities for the musical.