Dystopian plays poignant, powerful Churchill Fest 2010

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This article was published 30/01/2010 (6090 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 1971, Caryl Churchill wrote a radio play that speculated about urban life in the far-off year 2010.

The title, Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen, refers to air pollution that has become so noxious, merely opening a window causes immediate choking.

People living in a tiny room in a London high-rise use spray-cans of oxygen to get some relief. But there’s a powerful sense of doom in this 45-minute drama, the more satisfying of a pair of well-acted, future-imagining Churchill works presented by Theatre Incarnate.

As three characters’ lives are gradually revealed (director Christopher Sobczak skilfully treats Not as a stage play), it becomes evident that hunger, disease, environmental destruction, crime and despair are raging outside this four-walled bubble. Abortions are mandatory unless a licence is obtained.

Mick (Harry Nelken), who’s probably in his 60s, and his 30-year-old partner Vivian (Brenda McLean) make the best of things by staying inside. They await a rare visit from Mick’s son Claude (Andrew Cecon), a famous and wealthy teen idol.

Claude turns out to be an emotionless shell who has made a decision. The play provokes us to wonder what choice we would make under the circumstances, and which is the more "mad." Perhaps it implies that we in the privileged West are already sealed in our bubbles, clinging to memories and delusions as we shut out the suffering of the Earth and millions of its people.

Churchill is known for experimenting with language, but it’s hard to know why Vivian’s dialogue is penned in repeated words and phrases, rather like song lyrics. Maybe it suggests that the world will end not with a bang, but with us pathetically repeating ourselves as we sputter out.

There’s a poignant human dimension to Not in the father-son dynamic. When Mick confesses that he kisses the TV screen when his estranged son appears on it, it’s a heart-wrenching reminder that we’re increasingly sealed off from our loved ones by technology.

By comparison, the other dystopian piece, directed by McLean, that opens the evening, Far Away, is a colder, more satirical work that feels long at an hour. Written 10 years ago. it’s constructed in three scenes that jump in time.

In the first, which has the nightmarish feel of a horror movie, Joan (Charlene van Buekenhout) is a young girl who is fed a soothing explanation for unspeakable atrocities apparently going on in her aunt’s (Kim Zeglinski) shed.

In the second, most cleverly engaging scene, Joan has become a designer in a hat factory. She and her co-worker Todd (Cecon) seem to have thoughts of resisting the totalitarian regime, yet they’re blithely casual about the fact that their stylish hats are execution-wear for adults and children who are being exterminated. (Tremendous effort has gone into an effective propaganda-style video of a "hat parade," but its projection is greatly marred by a pillar on the stage.)

In the final scene, global war is raging and the absurdity introduced in the second scene becomes comic. Allies, traitors and enemies have become a ludicrous jumble. Churchill suggests that we’ve already got one foot in a world of such moral confusion, eroded trust, easy rationalization and tangled truth, it’s not Far Away at all.

Kudos to Theatre Incarnate for a thoughtful, high-calibre contribution to ChurchillFest. These works are wakeup calls rather than entertainments, but anyone who is taking the opportunity to explore this challenging playwright’s oeuvre should certainly put this double bill on their list.

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca