Contemporary War Drama: Caryl Churchill

Abstract

'Who's going to mobilise darkness and silence?' Joan asks, in the midst of a spectacular and increasingly surreal war, in Cary Churchill's allegorically encoded play Far Away (2000), in which the characters have to adapt to a permanent state of conflict and exception. In shortly under one hour, one of the most significant British political playwrights conjures a grotesque dystopia on an Orwellian scale and confronts the British audiences with the possibility of war in their home country. This chapter traces the structures of contemporary warfare through three of Churchill's recent plays, thereby arguing that the playwright not only quite prophetically depicts the current war on terror in Far Away, but already portrays the set-up for a closed society, a huge 'psychologically gated community' indifferent towards the reality of war and conflict, in This Is a Chair (1997), until she demonstrates how the recreation of memory leads to the violence that reproduces violence in her succinct take on the creation of frontlines in a little girl's head in Seven Jewish Children (2009).