Has he done enough to be granted an after-life in heaven rather than hell? Or has his life been too ‘comfortable’? Black humour characterises his ruminations on whether he has been cremated and if so have his ashes been carefully handled, or mixed up with others. Or rather, in this monologic sequence he wonders if he has reached the ‘pearly gates’. In the second scene, darkness and a thunderous, rumbling sound announce the deceased tunnelling away from this world, but seemingly not arriving at the next. In Here We Go the crisis of selfhood that Caryl Churchill scripts in plays such as A Number or Love and Information is no longer confined to the living but extends to the dead. She will be killed the very next day by a motorcyclist, so she tells us a fate announced with such verve by Engel that it elicited a burst of discomforted laughter from the audience. By contrast, the one ‘fact’ they each relate with absolute certainty is the time and manner of their own deaths in the years to come, or, in the case of the elderly female guest (Susan Engel), the day to come. Their speech is so elliptical that reminiscences are partial, incomplete, as though the guests have succumbed to dementia. In the first, relatively up-tempo scene, guests at the dead man’s wake speak of the deceased’s life. ![]() As in so much of Churchill’s theatre, temporally this trio of scenes defies a linear, chronological structure: they appear back to front – from the funeral, through the ‘tunnel’ of death, to the moments of dying.Įach part also has a different tone, rhythm and non/verbal patterning. And in the third, wordless scene he is seen living out his final dying days in the hands of a professional carer. ![]() A dead man (Patrick Godfrey) whose wake is held in the opening scene is dispatched to heaven (or is it hell?) in the second. I find myself being schizophrenically split between being deeply moved by the play’s reflections on mortality and yet somewhat frustrated by the lack of a more explicit, palpable political slant that has kept me returning again and again to Churchill’s work over the decades.Įchoes of Beckett have been widely attributed by the critics to this Churchill ‘short’. Here We Go, Caryl Churchill’s short, 45-minute play at the National, directed by Dominic Cooke, has divided the critics.
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