The playwright, Caryl Churchill, is who wrote Heart's Desire in 1997 as part of the Blue Heart series which contains two one-act plays which mainly experiment with structure and prose. Churchill was born in 1938 in London, moving to Canada after WW2 with her family. She is most known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her non-naturalistic techniques, exploring sexual politics and for her feminist themes which can most certainly be seen in her play, Top Girls. She was inspired by Brecht's use of Epic Theatre, which was, therefore, one of the influences for performing Heart's Desire in a Brechtian Style, as she could use his style to explore gender and identity. From the 1980s onward was more inspired by Artaudian techniques as shown by her experimentation in dance theatre which maybe is something that should have influenced the piece more.
In 1960 she graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, a woman's college at Oxford University where she gained a BA in English Literature. This is potentially where her feminist themes began to develop as she was constantly surrounded by women who wanted to make a better life and thus needed some feminist theory to help get them there due to misogyny. Hence why I think there's an element of feminism within the piece concerning Alice. It is at Oxford that she began to write plays with her first four being performed by a student theatre ensemble from the university.
In the 1960s/70s, she wrote short radio dramas for BBC Radio and TV plays for the BBC. Between 1974-5 she was the resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre which shows that she was experimental as the Royal Court allows young experimental playwrights (such as Alice Birch who wrote AOAS) to write plays for them.
Why were they writing?
"The prolific Churchill continued to push boundaries. In 1997 she collaborated with the composer Orlando Gough to create Hotel, a choreographed opera or sung ballet set in a hotel room. Also that year her surrealistic short play This Is a Chair was produced."
Source
It would, therefore, appear that Heart's Desire is a continuation of the surrealist style that Churchill appeared to be following in that year. Certainly the adjustment to a traditional play's structure can be seen as absurdist but I do think that the structure does show an element of the Verfremdungseffekt - it tilts an audience's perspective on how a play should traditionally be performed (traditional in this sense is that of Stanislavski's naturalistic style which most would be familiar with).
There is limited online and offline material about Blue Heart as a whole and this is one of the reasons why I think we found it hard to give the play a solid political meaning until much later in the rehearsal process. In some ways I do feel that the rehearsal process was similar to AOAS - attempting to get used to the structure and then add meaning - does this suggest that AOAS was more absurdist than naturalistic? I digress.
Due to the limited material, and the fact that the play has only been performed minimally professionally (notably in 1997) because of the structure it was highly probably we were going to deviate from Churchill's aim which I will explain below:
The Aim:
Rather than having a political message it would appear that Churchill is pursuing a social message and perhaps a message within the playwriting community. The social message that is clear and was clear to me at the start of the rehearsal process was a comment on social family roles and how the unsaid can be transformed into something much worse i.e. the breakdown of family roles and the family unit. Rather than pursuing a solely social standpoint, Churchill seems to be toying with the idea of writing to explore the structure of a play. Maybe this is why we found it hard to approach the play from a Brechtian angle - as said before, Churchill seems to be writing in an absurdist fashion in 1997 and so the Brechtian style wouldn't really fit with Churchill's aim.
The extract in context:
As is clear from Churchill's aim. we have deviated from this slightly in the final performance. Our decision to pursue a social message of family tensions in differing social classes is somewhat different from Churchill's aims. Although it does show Churchill's minor aim of showing family tensions, the major aim of her experimentation of structure is limited. Perhaps the extravagance of having scene changes and different people playing the same characters detracts from this major aim. In some respects it takes away from Churchill's minor aim as well - in original productions, the same actor would play the same character but due to the number of people we had in our group we found this hard. Maybe we should have not focused on the Brechtian element as much when choosing the play.
No comments:
Post a Comment