SOURCE: Brown, Mark Thacker. “‘Constantly Coming Back’: Eastern Thought and the Plays of Caryl Churchill.” In Caryl Churchill: A Casebook, edited by Phyllis R. Randall, pp. 25–47. New York: Garland Publishing, 1989.

In an interview in 1982 Caryl Churchill admitted that while she attended Oxford she was “‘strongly influenced by Buddhism, and that sort of thing,’ to which she finds herself ‘constantly coming back’” (Thurman 54). Yet only three of her plays, Owners, Not … not … not … not … not Enough Oxygen, and Top Girls, contain overt references to Buddhism. Even in these plays, the allusions to Buddhism seem merely tangential to the more important issues of ownership, ecology, and sexual identity. So what are we to make of Churchill's claim that she keeps returning to “‘Buddhism and that sort of thing’”? A closer look at Churchill's plays reveals that although they are not “about” Buddhism, they are infused with assumptions and implications that can be linked to counterparts in Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, and Jain thought. Caryl Churchill is not a practitioner of any of these religions, but her plays can be better understood when viewed in light of Eastern traditions and assumptions.

The cornerstone of Buddhist philosophy is that a desire for permanence in this world will inevitably lead to sorrow.

The [Theravada Buddhist] monks taught a dynamic phenomenalism, maintaining that everything in the universe, including the gods and the souls of living beings, was in a state of flux. Resistance to the cosmic flux of phenomena, and craving for permanence where permanence could not be found, led to inevitable sorrow. Salvation was to be obtained by the progressive abandonment of the sense of individuality, until it was lost completely in the indescribable state known as Nirvana.

(de Bary, Indian Tradition 92)

Buddhism and Taoism agree that individuality is an illusion and that permanence in this world is unattainable. The Taoists, however, explain continual flux as the alternation of two primal forces, the yin and the yang. This concept, which first became an important factor in Chinese thought during the Han dynasties (202 BC–9 AD and 25–220 AD), grew to include correspondences of yin and yang to all areas of nature.

Thus yang came to connote male, the sun, fire, heat, Heaven, creation, dominance, spring and summer, etc., while yin was related to the idea of female, the moon, cold, water, earth, nourishing and sustaining, recessiveness, autumn and winter, etc. Each force as it reaches its extreme produces its opposite and the two continue to succeed each other in a never-ending cycle. This constant reaction of the two forces on the metaphysical and physical planes was used to explain all processes of growth and change in the natural world.

(de Bary, Chinese Tradition 207)

Although such a brief and general overview cannot do justice to such concepts, perhaps a discussion of their application in specific plays will help clarify them.

Churchill's comment that she was strongly influenced by Eastern thought while an undergraduate at Oxford can be verified in two plays written during those undergraduate days and presented in student productions. The first, Having a Wonderful Time, clearly but subtly uses imagery, characterization, dialogue, and staging techniques that echo or suggest Eastern philosophy. In this play, Paul has come from Paris to spend two weeks at a resort hotel in the south of France, where he becomes involved with the members of the staff. Several of the people he meets represent opposites reminiscent of yin/yang, and their interaction causes continuous changes in their relationships. For example, John, the son of a local farmer, is in love with Anne, a waitress in the hotel run by her family. John's domination of Anne and his emphasis on ownership are apparent from the beginning of the play. In his first lines John discusses his prospective ownership of some land and his chance meeting with its current owner. Significantly, this interview involving John's efforts to stabilize his life, to fulfill his desire for permanence by buying land, occurs on a hill beneath a rising moon. The ideograms for yin and yang indicate the shady and sunny sides of a hill, fou. The reference to the rising moon is one of many examples throughout the play which allude to the alternation of light and dark. Later, when the hillside John dreamed of buying is sold to someone else, the rising moon has turned to daylight. As the hard reality of daylight approaches, John tells us that his dream is vanishing. Change, it would seem, is inevitable; life is an endless series of recurring cycles punctuated daily by intervals of dark and light.

Paul's opening speech first establishes this cyclical idea. He tells us that every year he takes a vacation at the same kind of seaside resort and does the same things while he is there. As he continues, Paul alludes to the daily flux and change of human relationships that will dominate the play. What might seem like a lover's treachery in the dark of night looks entirely different by high noon of the next day. When he speaks to the waitress, Jeanine, it is of the stars and the lights of the town at night, lights that seem to have an attraction for him. He also emphasizes, for no apparent reason, that the action takes place on a hill. Later, when the discussion of owning land has come up, Paul admits that every summer he considers giving up his life in Paris and settling down on his own land, but that every autumn he gives up this idea. Paul's whimsical aspiration to own some cicadas and sunshine reinforces the cyclical motif, and his admission that he changes his mind about this idea seasonally undercuts the notion that ownership can lead to stability. Also, the change from summer to autumn in Taoism is a change from a season of yang dominance to one of yin recessiveness. It is, therefore, appropriate that he gives up the idea of ownership every autumn.

As we have seen, the desire for such worldly stability is the root cause of suffering in both the Buddhist and the Taoist traditions. John's desire to possess and control and dominate creates a chain of causation. Rather than becoming a part of nature, John wishes to change it to suit him. The land is not even his, yet he has made elaborate plans for its “improvement.” He must clear the wood, terrace the hillside, dig a well, irrigate, select the best variety of grapes, and build a house. John's thirst for control includes making rules for Anne. When he hears that Anne has taken a walk through an old abandoned villa, he accuses her of trespassing, and he dismisses the protests of Anne, Charles, and Paul by saying that they would understand if they were land owners. He also forbids Anne to walk with her cousin Charles on the path across the hill because John considers it his personal path. Anne reminds him testily that he does not own the wood, and implicitly she wishes him to understand that he does not own her either. Paul realizes that John's rules are unnatural and unfair. By making Anne feel guilty for breaking these rules, John has robbed Anne of her innocence and forced her to feel an unnatural sense of obligation to him. John wishes to establish control over Charles as well, mainly to limit Charles's access to Anne.

In contrast to John's dreams of “owning” Anne and a specific tract of land on a hillside is Charles's apparent lack of desire. Charles never seems to notice anything; according to Anne's father, Charles would not even notice if the entire hotel were to burn down. Later in the play, Anne confesses that in anger she threw a glass at the wall of the restaurant and contrasts herself with Charles, who would probably just sit passively and uncomplainingly even in hell itself. Charles's lack of interest in the world of ownership and dominance, his apparent indifference to the flames of passion and desire, is interpreted by several of the other characters as stupidity. Yet this apparent dullness and inaction are advanced as positive moods in Taoist thought. “Taking no action” to influence the natural flux of things and being “dull and unwitting” in the world's eyes indicate a kind of insight into the eternal cycle of yin and yang:

A gentleman who profoundly penetrates all things and is in harmony with their transformations will be contented with whatever time may bring. He follows the course of nature in whatever situation he may be. He will be intuitively united with creation.

(de Bary, Chinese Tradition 285)

Thus when Anne and Paul become attracted to each other, Charles rejects Jeanine's suggestion that he somehow intervene, saying that moths would be easier to distract from the flame of a candle. He understands that Anne and Paul's attraction to each other is natural, and he even seems pleased when Jeanine calls him stupid for not doing anything to influence them.

Charles's metaphor of a moth's attraction to a candle flame is a recurrent image in Buddhist literature and in this play. The flames of desire have an almost hypnotic effect on mankind, yet sexual desire is the basis for much of the world's suffering. Consider this typical Buddhist verse, an exhortation to withstand the attractions of women:

As a moth in a fire
Is singed,
Insects set afire
Have no refuge.
Confused by women
One is burnt by passion.
Because of them
One falls into evil ways.
There is no refuge.

(Paul 44)

Churchill makes her use of this same metaphor explicit by re-emphasizing it throughout the play. Paul is continually attracted to the lights of the town and suggests early in the play that they all go to town to the lights; Charles comments that Paul is drawn to them like a moth. Later, after talking at length about the changing moon and the stars, Paul decides to follow the car's headlights to the illuminated town. After this decision the stage directions call for a blackout followed by an interval of darkness and then the bright morning light. As the lights come up, we see Jeanine and Anne primping in front of a mirror while Jeanine applies “Moonlight Tangerine” lipstick, which promises to make women devastatingly alluring. Again, when Paul admits to the audience that he is attracted to Anne, he expresses his fascination in terms of light. He says that he is fearful of Anne just as he is of the heavenly lights, the ones that never go out even when the lights of the town are extinguished. His cryptic confessions to Anne are also couched in light imagery and the contrast of light and shade: for Paul, Anne's face is like much-needed shade on a day when bright sun is all around him. Still later, when Paul gains Anne's confidence, she admits that she wants to be free from the constant change, the constant tug of John on one side (yang) and Charles on the other (yin). Paul assures her that she is free and again uses the dominant metaphor when he says that she is a candle flame and they are all moths.

Although Paul tells her she is free and can act of her own volition, Anne repeatedly begs him to help her “make them stop.” At certain times she feels as if she has risen above the constant tug-of-war in a kind of astral travel, and she sees them all below her, unable to influence her. When Anne asks Charles if she has not succeeded in breaking away from the ebb and flow, Charles's eventual answer is a poetic evocation of yin and yang, an apparent reminder of the folly of resisting such primal forces. He tells her that the sun sets, the moon rises over the hillside, that no matter what one does, time continues. Tomorrow will come, and moths will continue to flit toward the flame. That this reminder results in Anne's total capitulation to John's demands signals her acknowledgment of these forces. She becomes, much to Paul's dissatisfaction, the perfect, passive, yin complement to John's yang dominance. Charles, showing keen insight, refuses to resist or act to influence this turn of events.

Another aspect of Charles's insight is his apparent indifference to individuality. Thus, early in the play Charles tells Anne that he rarely notices any distinctions between people. They are all the same, like air. In his indifference Charles seems to treat all living creatures with equal respect, combining three beliefs: the Jain belief that all living things (and even some inanimate objects) have souls; the Hindu and Buddhist beliefs that even insects participate in the endless cycle of rebirth and that how we treat them can affect our own prospects for a future life; and the Taoist belief that one must not tamper with the natural order of things. So, when Charles catches a moth, he takes great care to be gentle, and he resists Anne's requests to give it to her, lest it come to any harm. While this quiet action transpires, John speaks earnestly about his projected improvements of the property he covets, and Paul tells a story about a woman who found that getting the man she had long desired did not make her happy. Charles responds to Paul's story by saying that both the man and the woman should have remained indifferent. Jeeringly, John responds that playing with moths does not interest everyone as it does Charles.

The play seems to take Charles's side in this dispute. Moths and humans are both inevitably doomed to be attracted to the flames of their desires. The need to desire someone or something and then to strive to attain it seems almost more important than what is desired. Thus the endless round of new “objects” of desire is revealed in the continual change of partners in the play: Paul and Jeanine, Anne and John, Charles and Anne, Paul and Anne, Charles and Jeanine, and back to Anne and John. Unlike John, Charles sees through this flux with the penetration of a Zen sage, and the contrast is nowhere more apparent than when John comes to say goodbye before he goes off to the factory to earn money for his campaign of acquisition and “improvement.” Before he goes, John bullies Anne, accuses her of misconduct with Charles, and sets down rules for her behavior. During this entire scene Charles is lying on the floor, unable to move because an ant is crawling on his leg. He dares not disturb it, and he is totally engrossed in watching it.

Clearly, Churchill's exposure to Eastern concepts had a profound effect on this play. The characters themselves are conceived with the yin/yang polarity in mind, and the continual references to the hill, the rising sun or moon, the changing seasons, the moth's inevitable attraction to the lights, and the apparent illusion of individuality are all explicable in terms of Eastern assumptions and traditions. Having a Wonderful Time is only the first of many plays that are influenced in this manner, but it is the one in which this influence is most pervasive.

Easy Death (written in 1960 and first performed at Oxford) focuses mainly on the pernicious effects of desire or craving. Desire causes suffering and leads to despair, and reliance on gadgets or contrivances to save labor or to conquer nature destroys one's ability to become one with nature's rhythms. Moreover, individual desire can be the root cause of aggregate desire, which results in strife between nations. At the beginning of the play Steve speaks briefly at a rally for Speak for Peace, indicating that, if we could overcome our urge to want things, we would not have any reason to fight wars. Yet, he acknowledges, any form of desire, even desire for such worthwhile ends as peace and social justice, leads to pain and despair, and therefore his own desires seem to be bent on self-annihilation. Indeed, when one of the other Speak-for-Peace speakers contends that in a nuclear war all life would end, Steve seems pleased with that prospect. Because of his realization, he supports the Fanatic's apocalyptic “Kill for Peace” campaign and, indeed, wants to be the Fanatic's first victim: “I might not have chosen it [life] if I could have started wandering from life to death and back; I might have settled somewhere else, in nothing out of life, not nothing in it” (42). Although committing suicide to avoid the endless cycles of rebirth (Buddhism, Hinduism) or yin/yang (Taoism) is frowned upon, Steve's desire to settle “somewhere in nothing out of life,” beyond desire, is, broadly speaking, the goal of all three religions.

As in later Churchill plays, Easy Death presents two characters, Steve and Jack, meant to contrast with each other. Whereas Steve is a drifter without possessions and without a home, Jack has risen, through power-hungry perseverance, from a life of poverty to become an influential capitalist, part owner of the Ezy-life conglomerate, which makes a stunning array of products for virtually any need: Ezy-sleep, Ezy-build, Ezy-eat, Ezy-kleen, Ezy-pep, Ezy-love, etc. This intervention into every sphere with contrivances to make life easier runs counter to the Taoist social ideal of a primitive farming community unselfconsciously living within the symbiotic cycles of nature. Chuang-tzu, one of the foremost authorities in Taoism, wanted people to avoid all artificial contrivances, because the Tao would not dwell in the agitated souls and the cunning hearts of those who used such devices. Churchill shows how craving these devices leads to greater and greater complexity as one desire causes the next. Jack and his wife Jennifer lament that each material need suggests or spawns another in a seemingly endless parade of washing machines, dishwashers, furniture, floor polishers, hoovers, and gadgets of every description. The gadgets eventually become the reason that Jack must work so hard. They have to be paid for, and then more gadgets must be obtained so that the time saved by the earlier gadgets can be filled up with entertainment. Truly, in Western culture the desire for material things can set in motion an unending causal chain of insatiable craving.

Jack's career is another apt illustration of this process. Despite his meteoric rise in the company, Jack is not happy. At various junctures in the play he tells us what would make him happy, but when he gets what he desires he simply finds something else to crave, some obstacle to his happiness. Thus, when he finds out that his wife is not cheating on him and when his son returns from Europe to announce that he has decided after all to join Jack's company, his happiness should be complete. Instead, he immediately gives his old girlfriend a call, goes to visit her, and asks her to help him figure out what his life lacks. She tells him that he never allows himself to be satisfied, and, indeed, is rather juvenile in that regard, but her diagnosis goes unheeded. Eventually, as the lives of Jack and Steve intertwine, both men come to the same realization: Life brings nothing but despair, and in the end everything that seems to give life permanence and meaning is lost. Self-annihilation seems to be the only alternative. Jack asks Steve to kill him, just as Steve had asked the Fanatic to make him his first victim. Even though Steve refuses, Jack plans to kill himself, a decision that brings him a kind of peace outside the realm of desire. Not wanting leaves him nothing more to do, and he experiences a kind of blissful passivity.

Later, at Jack's house, when the subject of suicide again emerges, both men seem to agree that life is an endless round of illusive desires, an endless search to discover what is missing. One feels that one is making progress, but then realizes that progress itself is an illusion. Nothing helps to end the craving. After this agreement, Jack and Steve seem more hopeful. They have found a comradeship that might ease their sense of despair. However, this upbeat moment is soon dissipated by mistrust that leads to a confrontation that costs both men their lives. In the end, the play seems to concur with Steve that despair is the knowledge that everyone and everything are meaningless. We do not know why anything happens, even if science has told us the how of natural phenomena and has helped us to “conquer” nature with gadgets.

Our assumptions that our lives have meaning and that we are individually significant are again under attack in The Ants, (radio production, 1962). As the play begins, Tim, a small boy, detachedly observes what is apparently a great many ants. He picks a favorite ant and names him Bill, but he soon realizes that he cannot keep track of Bill—he keeps losing him in the mass of ants who all look alike. During the course of the play the ants are equated with the mass of humanity. When Tim declares that he likes ants, his grandfather responds: “They've no imagination, just like people. … Look at them from the top of a tall building some time, just funny patterns of people …” (95).

Whereas Charles in Having a Wonderful Time treats insects with the greatest respect and allows an ant to crawl on him for hours rather than interrupt the course of nature, Tim decides to annihilate the ants by dousing them with gasoline and setting fire to them, an idea gleaned from his mother, who wants to “do” something about the ants (91). The resulting destruction of all the ants is analogous to the “bomb” that has been dropped on “the enemy,” and has been the subject of discussion earlier in the play. Churchill's message seems to be that we are not as significant, individually or as a species, as we would like to think we are. We could be annihilated as easily as the ants. Indeed, the headline in the paper above the bomb article reads simply, “Ten-thousand Dead,” precisely the number of ants that Grandfather tells Tim there are in the ant colony.

Churchill has not chosen this number randomly. In Taoism, the number ten thousand symbolizes totality; indeed, the Taoists call the universe wan wu, “the ten thousand things.” Thus when Lao-tzu wishes to express the feeling of standing outside of the flux of the entire world as a detached onlooker, he says, “Having attained perfect emptiness, holding fast to stillness, I can watch the return of the ever active Ten Thousand Beings” (quoted in Watts 34). Therefore, the killing of ten thousand is a Taoist metaphor for total destruction. Although Tim's detached viewpoint offers him a chance to make a profound discovery about human activity as he watches the ants, Tim prefers to destroy them, to dominate them, to control them.

In her first commercially produced stage play, Owners (1972), Churchill again contrasts Western and Eastern attitudes. Such a contrast is evident in the epigrams she places at the beginning of the play's text, one from a Christian hymn—“Onward Christian Soldiers, / Marching as to war”—and one from a Zen poem—“Sitting quietly, doing nothing. / Spring comes and the grass grows by itself” (Owners 3).

In a note written in 1984 for Methuen's first volume of her collected plays, Churchill explains that she wanted

one character with the active achieving attitude of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the other the “sitting quietly, doing nothing” of the Zen poem. The active one had to be a woman, the passive one a man, for their attitudes to show up clearly as what they believed rather than as conventional male and female behavior. So Marion and Alec developed from that train of thought.

(4)

In an interview concerning Owners Churchill further described the difference between Western and Eastern attitudes, the passivity of oriental versus the activity of Western culture with its emphasis on control and acquisitiveness. Asked if the term “emotional capitalism” was an accurate assessment of the theme, Churchill responded:

Yes, I mean on a simple political level I think owning is stupid. It would be better to have land nationalised. But taking everything back to the abstract ideas in the play, it's to do with the whole thing of western capitalistic individualism, puritanism, and everything which came out of Christianity, as opposed for example, to Chinese philosophical mysticism, Taoism and so on. The thing of a man being totally passive and walking through fire and jumping into water and not being affected because he doesn't expect to be. Just going with things. Going with the fire and the water. And then when people say afterwards “How did you walk through fire?” he says, “What fire?” … The complete opposite of the feeling of tremendous striving and getting and owning, and feeling one must be in control of one's property, one's family, one's self, one's life.

(Gooch 41)

To illustrate this dichotomy in Owners, the Western yang characters, Marion and her husband Clegg, exhibit the desire to control everything in their respective paths. The more despicable of these “owners,” Clegg the butcher, shows his stripes in this dialogue with Alec, who has resumed an affair with Marion:

You make a big mistake about Marion. She's not like other women in just one important respect. She is mine. I have invested heavily in Marion and don't intend to lose any part of my profit. She is my flesh. And touching her you touch me. And I will not let myself be touched.

(56)

Clegg's attitude contrasts sharply with that of Alec, whose wife, Lisa, notices that he is “very nice to me all the time. But I sometimes wonder if he knows who I am. I think he'd be nice to anyone” (24). Confronted by his lover Marion about his love for her compared to his love for Lisa, Alec responds: “I don't think I could say I loved anyone more than anyone else. … I can say I love you and Lisa. But it wouldn't matter if I never saw you again” (46–7).

Although Alec and Marion have in the past had a rather lengthy affair, Alec is now a total mystery to Marion, and Churchill seems to be saying that Alec's desirelessness, his yin passivity, is a personality trait foreign to Western culture. Her inclusion of such yin personalities in so many of her early plays represents a challenge to the assumptions of the West. In summing up the significance of Alec's character in the play, Helene Keyssar emphasizes that he is an alternative to the dominant culture:

Alec is the antithesis not only of Marion but of any available male types. Educated and a skilled glazier, he holds no salaried job, not because he is unable to find outside work, but because he prefers to stay at home. … He is a man with perfect absence of desire either for property or to wield control over others. Attempts by others in the play to reveal Alec's passivity as inherently aggressive are repeatedly thwarted. Alec retains his moral autonomy while rejecting all obligations to social convention.

(204–05)

Later in the play Alec exhibits the traits of a holy man who can walk through fire, oblivious to danger. Having led his own family to safety, Alec re-enters his burning house to save a neighbor's child. It is clear that Churchill wants him to symbolize a higher level of consciousness, free from cravings for permanence, willing to “go with” the natural cycles of an Eastern view of reality. Alec's calm death in the inferno ennobles him because it shows us that he has meant what he has said earlier about loving all children equally. (The Buddhist practice of self-immolation to protest war or injustice also comes to mind. Churchill addresses this practice in Not … not … not … not … not Enough Oxygen, a radio play that includes ecologists who decide to use this method of protest.)

Churchill's assault on basic Western assumptions continues in Moving Clocks Go Slow and in Traps. The former, a science fiction drama set in the not-terribly-distant future, involves an alien invasion of earth. The aliens must enter some living or newly dead body in order to survive, and their difficulties in adjusting to human concepts and limitations seem to verify many Eastern assumptions. For example, an alien tells his new acquaintances that their concepts of individuality and personality are not valid because one alien can occupy one cell, and therefore what seems to be one human actually can be a collection of millions of aliens. The alien treats each separate cell as an individual creature and each human as a mass of these creatures. Rocket reacts against such talk and angrily asserts that he is one separate individual made up of cells, but Stella seems to see the truth in the alien's idea. She likes to think that she exists only as a collection of cells, her personality an illusion. Also, because every creature, even the apparently most insignificant cell of a creature, is inhabitable by an alien, a levelling effect takes place. Humans are no longer the dominant or superior species. This pan-soul idea seems to be a dramatic glimpse of the world as the Jains envision it, for the Jains believe that everything has a soul:

In every stone on the highway a soul is locked, so tightly enchained by matter that it cannot escape the careless foot that kicks it or cry out in pain, but capable of suffering nevertheless. When a match is struck a fire-being, with a soul which may one day be reborn in a human body, is born, only to die a few moments afterwards. In every drop of rain, in every breath of wind, in every lump of clay, is a living soul.

(de Bary, Indian Tradition 47)

To a Westerner this idea of the whole earth alive and teeming is frightening. This fright is Rocket's problem, and he confesses his fear to Kay that every tree or shrub, every abandoned piece of machinery, every bird and every stone seems to threaten him and his long-held views of the world.

Other Western concepts that are called into question in this play and in Traps are our ideas of space and time. In Moving Clocks Q, the “Special” who runs earth, claims that he can transport himself instantaneously through space without any time elapsing and that his only barriers are those he places on himself. Similarly, Apollo, the alien, subverts the notion that time is linear. Where he comes from, events do not occur in a sequence because all of time is accessible simultaneously, just as space is on earth. Later, we are treated to a dramatic rendering of a slippage in time. Mrs. Provis, the elderly grandmother, points to a little girl waving from the back window of a car and realizes it is she herself as a little girl, existing in the same space and at the same time. Kay acknowledges this slippage and tells us that at any single moment the flowers around her could go through all the processes of their life cycle at once. Soon after Kay makes this discovery, there are four repetitions of the same section of dialogue and action. In her stage directions Churchill notes that these sections are supposed to mirror each other exactly, and the characters are to be unaware that they have done these things before. Finally, Kay indicates that her linear progress in time has stopped. Not long after these unaccountable repetitions, Stella regresses in time, and Kay begins to treat Stella more and more as a little girl as Stella's dialogue and manner become more and more childish. Similarly, Kay goes from her role of mother to that of child, and Mrs. Provis too becomes more youthful. In their dialogue during this time, old arguments are rehashed verbatim, and we are meant to believe that time has rippled back on itself. Such aberrations in time strike the Western mind as fantastic, but to a Jain, who believes that time is material, or to a Taoist, who believes that time is cyclical and ever arriving back at its beginning, such notions might seem more plausible.

Eastern assertions that space and linear time are illusions are also given dramatic expression in Traps. Not only do the characters interchange roles with no warning, but the scene shifts, we are told, from the city to the country while the set remains exactly the same. In addition, causation is suspended. For example, one character who has committed suicide simply reappears as if nothing has happened, and the rest of the characters, who have discussed the suicide, show no surprise whatsoever.

Several other aspects of Eastern thought which may have influenced Churchill are the concepts of collective or historical “karma” and individual “karma,” as well as cycles of rebirth. Churchill has written numerous plays which focus the audience's attention on various historical periods. Although a Buddhist would claim that the Hegelian “dialectic” of historical causation (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) which underlies Marxism is illusory, the actions of many individuals at any specific juncture in history can cause a kind of collective karma.

Churchill combines aspects of these ideas in many of her plays. She uses various historical settings in Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Vinegar Tom, Cloud Nine, and Softcops to elucidate contemporary attitudes and assumptions in terms of their historical perspectives. This technique allows her to suggest the evolution of ideas about sexuality, criminality, evil, and religious orthodoxy. Churchill achieves this evolution of ideas in various ways. In Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, she explains in a note at the beginning of the text how she combined the historical events with the concept of the illusoriness of well-defined selfhood or individuality, a Buddhist concept, as we have seen:

The characters are not played by the same actors each time they appear. The audience should not have to worry exactly which character they are seeing. Each scene can be taken as a separate event rather than part of a story. This seems to reflect better the reality of large events like war and revolution where many people share the same kind of experience. … When different actors play the parts what comes over is a large event involving many people, whose characters resonate in a way they wouldn't if they were more clearly defined.

(Light ii)

David Mairowitz sees this technique as an innovation which challenges our cultural assumptions about personality and individuality:

One of the dramatic virtues of this magnificent play is that it can assume a certain given historical foundation and proceed to de-emphasize specific characters and events. In fact the play's history is rooted wholly in a collective consciousness which is its protagonist and hero. … Churchill does not feel constrained by the preeminence of personality in our culture (and in our theatre), and twists our comprehension of inter-relationships in her view of events and in her operation of the stage.

(24)

By blurring the traditional Western concepts of causation and personality, Churchill gains the freedom to create a vision of history that is not merely limited to specific events and is not merely a cardboard analogue to contemporary issues.

In one of her more famous efforts, Cloud Nine, Churchill again relies on dramatic techniques which have parallels in Eastern philosophy. Although only half of the play takes place in a historical setting, colonial Africa in 1880, Churchill again undermines assumptions about selfhood by requiring members of the cast to change characters for the second act. Also, she employs a time scheme which confuses many critics and audiences: “Act II takes place in London in the present, but for the characters it is twenty-five years later” (1984, 1). Reacting to this tampering with time, Clive Barnes's comment is typical. “I'm not sure what that means either. Presumably Miss Churchill is implying that the British pattern of relationships has been colored by Britain's imperial past …” (85). Similarly, Robert Asahina remarks that

We are still reeling from Act One when Churchill throws us for another loop at the beginning of Act Two. It is now one hundred years later, in contemporary London, but the characters have aged only twenty-five years, thus maintaining a continuity with the past that paradoxically underscores the passage of time and the change in mores. … Sound confusing? Well, it is. …

(564–65)

This dramatic device heightens the contrast between the two periods but reinforces the concept of historical and individual rebirth. The play asks the audience to adjust on so many levels—change of time, location, actor/character relationship, and social “norms”—that the assumptions which underlie modern Western views of reality are again strongly challenged.

Top Girls (1982) represents another challenge. The first act presents an “impossible” dinner party which includes guests, some historical, some created, from several different centuries. The convocation of women from such diverse backgrounds allows Churchill to show a modern audience how our assumptions about roles in society can determine how we think. Though the jokes are sometimes at the expense of the various guests, Churchill offers us a sounding board to test our own unwavering beliefs. The switch in the second act to the offices of the Top Girls Employment Agency, however, leaves us with the same vestigial influences of personality (a Buddhist would say “dormant leanings” from previous lives) that we felt in the second act of Cloud Nine. Padmasiri de Silva explains these leanings in Buddhism as “persistent traits coming down innumerable lives” and notes that such a notion is

alien to most systems of Western psychology, though a rather distant echo of it may be found in the notion of a “collective unconscious,” mentioned by Freud and developed by Jung.

(74)

The new role that each actress must play (only Marlene remains constant) is inevitably colored by the role she played in Act I. The transformation of each character into a new character cannot avoid influencing how we view the second character. We cannot help wondering, for example, what the significance is of Dull Gret becoming Angie. Churchill provides no answers, but the characters we meet in the second act are clearly more complex because of their “counterparts” in the first act. Again, the sense that history is always with us because of the endless cycles of rebirth is suggested in the staging of Top Girls.

If Top Girls causes some confusion because of the requirement that some actresses must play more than one character, the permutations in Fen are mindboggling. John Simon objects:

Five actresses and one actor … portray here, as it were, the entire population of a hamlet: the toilers on the earth, the harsh overseers who are themselves exploited, even the ultimate overlord from a Japanese conglomerate. But the subject seems more suited to a semi-documentary film: There are too many characters for us to get truly involved with any (shrewd old Brecht always managed to have a central charismatic figure or two), and played by too few actors, adding to our confusion.

(77)

Simon's complaints miss the point: the characters are meant to represent the gamut of personality types that might be found in a small farming village, but the play depends on fluidity of characterization for its effect. The lack of specificity and the quick, impressionistic slices of life which compose the play lead the viewer to a conviction of the truthfulness of the picture of country life it portrays. Churchill does not insist on clearly and deeply defined characters because she does not want us to assume that these are isolated, exceptional examples of oppression under a capitalist system. As in Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, the characterization must enlarge the scope of the drama, not limit it. Again, this innovative method of staging the drama, using so few actors, may stem from Churchill's interest in Eastern assumptions about personality. Simon's requirement that Churchill include a “central charismatic figure or two,” as Brecht did in his plays, underscores the need of Western audiences for defined personalities, a need that Churchill, as we have seen, occasionally uses against us. She is in the business, especially in Fen, of undermining the audience's assumptions, just as Brecht strove to do.

In these innovative plays, Caryl Churchill challenges assumptions that Western audiences traditionally hold. Although many of her dramatic techniques undoubtedly developed in a workshop setting, I have shown that even from undergraduate days her plays have utilized dramatic devices that are more consistent with Eastern philosophy than with Western. Churchill does not “constantly come back” to Buddhism in any overt way, but she surely has been influenced by Buddhist, Taoist, Jain, and Hindu thought. For her, the enemy is the status quo in Western, bourgeois society, and the tenets of Buddhism, with their emphasis on disciplined denial of the validity of sensory impressions and passive resistance to the cravings of the world, provide formidable opposition to the acquisitiveness of western capitalism.

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