Caryl Churchill and more things in heaven and earth

London (and indeed the world) could use a whole season of the plays of Caryl Churchill, who in September passed her eighty-third birthday. Since at least the 1970s, her work has been bold in language and politics, while also being experimental, eccentric, and fabulously imaginative. Cloud 9, Top Girls, Blue Heart, Far Away are all among the Churchill plays that take drama where it had not been before; it would be good to revisit and reassess them and others:

Her latest, What If If Only, is just over fifteen minutes long; its world premiere, at the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, occurred on Friday 1 October. As written, it features five characters; as directed by James Macdonald, it has three actors. In theory, it would be interesting to see it with five actors; just now, however, it’s hard to imagine it except in this version, where the marvellous and singular Linda Bassett plays three roles as facets of the same strange apparition. 

Churchill keeps altering the kind of drama we’re watching. As What If starts, one man (“Someone” in the script; the actor is John Haffernan) is unhappily talking alone to the memory of his recently dead partner, desperately missing conversation with her. What he tells he is hilarious; but the pathos with which he speaks to empty air, longing for her to send some flicker of acknowledgment from beyond death, is piercing. His speech is very simply worded (“I’ve nothing to say really, I just miss you”). 

The play’s first transformation occurs when the female apparition (Bassett) enters, named as “Future” in the script. Her language is an echo chamber in the manner of Gertrude Stein. “I can only give you what if if only if only you hadn’t something if only they hadn’t something all different different I can if you can.” Bassett is the ideal Churchill actor, because she manages to sound both common-sensical and musically eloquent at the same time: she finds melody and pulse within the words with no loss of straightforwardness. She’s almost in the tradition of such English character-comic actresses as Irene Handl, Joan Hickson, and Liz Smith, but she never goes over into caricature.

To a lesser extent, “Someone”, too, now speaks the same way. “What are you? You feel like a ghost there’s a shiver but you’re not you’re not I don’t want someone else I want.”

Neither of them here is talking nonsense. Both of them are grappling with aspects of existence and thought that are uncharted territory. She is not the answer to his prayer, but she is an answer. She has never lived; she is a future waiting to happen. And now we glimpse the possibility of multiple parallel planes of existence, multiple possible versions of the future. “Don’t don’t don’t let them all in. Of course there’s so many  so many futures that didn’t happen like drops of rain grains of sand atoms in your heart. You’ll have no peace if they all come after you and I’m the best I’m a brilliant Future and I could easily have happened but stupid stupid kept choosing the wrong things and let me die. I’m a Future you’d really like, everyone would have liked me if I’d happened.” When he asks “Because you’re what?”, she replies “Equality and cake and no bad bits at all…”

Here she really is - sweetly, amusingly - talking blarney. So what are we to make of this candidate for a Future that speaks as shamelessly as any politician in an election campaign? As the conversation keeps moving on, she becomes not one Future but many Futures. (The script allows for a vision of a vast plurality.) 

But he, now unable to cope with this overwhelming ontological crisis, calls a halt. Haffernan here bends almost double under the pressure, cutting himself off from all external forces. 

The air changes again. In the script, all  Futures vanish, but a new being materialises; onstage it’s still Bassett, whose way of talking has moved on. “I’m the only Future that didn’t die, I’m what’s happening hurrah hello I’m the Present, I’m here I’m now I’m here I’m now now now now every second gone to the past but always here now now now now. Do you like me? I’m not very nice not altogether. So many people sick and dead and crazy from what I’m like you know the kind of thing you’re living now now hello and of course the wars the Present always has wars and any Future that promised no more is dead dead dead….” 

She’s not campaigning now; she’s debunking any nonsense around her role - and she’s funny. Soon she introduces one more character, a Child Future. For Present, this Child Future is just a possibility (“Do you want to help it happen?”). But the Child Future entertains no doubts, repeating the words “I’m going to happen”. And with those words the play ends. 

At every point here, thanks not least to Bassett’s fabulously multifaceted inflections, it’s impressive how Churchill’s use of Steinian recycling of short phrases becomes not arch, not camp, but suggestive, affecting, propulsive. Short though this play is, Churchill keeps it suspenseful. We never know where we are with these characters. What began as a scene of private mourning develops into an exploration of existence. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horacio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy - but Caryl Churchill has been dreaming of all of them.

Alastair Macaulay 

1: John Heffernan and Linda Bassett in Caryl Churchill’s What If If Only. Photo: Johan Persson.

2: John Heffernan and Linda Bassett in Caryl Churchill’s What If If Only. Photo: Johan Persson.