Croggon to Churchill

My reading of Alison Croggon has hit a paywall, alas. Much of her contemporary criticism appears to be available at a website of her own co-creation, and access to all content is not free.

Apparently until about six years ago she blogged—theater reviews mostly as far as I can tell, which tend to have no enduring shelf-life (even the writings of the great Brustein, alas), so I will be “picky and choosy” about entering in.

A review of Caryl Churchill struck my eye—Churchill whom I have assessed as the greatest living playwright of my lifetime (though my exposure is limited). Even Churchill’s plays are seldom staged in Chicago, though that has changed in recent years. I saw Top Girls not long ago and mentioned it in this blog. The production I saw was flawed; but the script held—as you would expect with Churchill. Croggon has this to say:

Churchill exposes... questions with a text that remains formally audacious, and which made me reflect how slight are the ambitions of most contemporary plays. She combines a sense of total formal freedom with an almost icy control of her metaphors. I’ve noticed before that Churchill's work has an odd effect: it's only at the end that everything suddenly slots into place. It's as if she is building an architecturally impossible arch, which may fall down at any moment: and then, in the final moments, she places the keystone, and all at once the structure reveals itself as clear and formally irreproachable. It’s this almost magical reflexiveness, a mixture of complete imaginative freedom and stern dramaturgical and stylistic discipline, that makes her one of the major English language playwrights of the past half century.

Linked in the body of this review was another review of a Churchill play, The Skriker which is the play that put me into Churchill’s camp permanently after a showing at Chicago’s Defiant Theatre company which I saw first by accident then a second time by design, at a time when I had only written a sparse number of plays. When I had the chance—up in Stratford, Ontario, I think—I got to pick up a couple Methuen collections of her plays which I devoured with avidity. I seldom read plays—almost never anymore—but in Churchill’s case there was no option. Had I not already found it years before in Brecht and Pinter, Churchill might well have been my “gateway drug” to theater, to use a metaphor Croggon is fond of.

Actually—there’s been no “gateway drug” to theater for me. Pinter I read for the writing, before I had any sense of the staging of things. (Decades passed before I saw a production.) Brecht pulled me in as literature: initial readings of Galileo and Mother Courage showed me “characters” to rival Shakespeare’s palpably (something Pinter’s never did, obviously, but no one else's either, less obviously, in such plays as I was exposed to in such school readings I had read by assignment).

Still, I found no impetus to playwriting, or even reading of plays, till nearly thirty years of age, when I determined to try to find something which (I hoped) might to lead to a career. It was only after picking up the pen, shirtsleeves rolled up so to speak, that I understood the illusory nature of “persons in the play” or “characters”—something Mamet is clear on though I arrived independently to that conclusion.