A2 Drama & Theatre Studies Summer Homework Reece Fitzgerald

TASK 1 - CONTEXTUAL RELEVANCE OF THE PLAYS: THEN AND NOW

Caryl Churchill has been working as a playwright ever since she graduated from Oxford University with a BA(Hons) in English Literature. Two of her plays, Far Away and A Number are little over ten years old and are both written in a clear postmodernist style. Far Away is based on the premise of a world in which everything in nature is at war and was published in 2000 whilst A Number was published just two years later, in 2002. A Number addresses the subject of human cloning and is set in the near future and has just four characters. Churchill is well known for writing about feminist themes as her main spearhead for her work, but it seems that in recent years she has turned to a more political writing perspective given the play that she wrote in 2009 entitled Seven Jewish Children a play for Gaza. The major theme of Far Away is that of fear, especially that of government upon its citizens and the concept of human smuggling. A possible contextual influence on Caryl Churchill is the Human Rights Act 1998 which only came into force on 2nd October 2000, a mere month before the first performance of Caryl Churchills play Far Away. The play is about war and the way that ordinary people normalise atrocity. It shows a demise to our world and the world turning in on itself. There was positive reaction to the Human Rights Act 1998 which was to work in conjunction with the EU Human Rights Act of 1950 to make crimes against human rights more enforceable in our own UK courts. The play does have strong links with regards to governments and the imprisonment of citizens by governments which is still continuing today in places such as Syria and Egypt where we are continually seeing huge civil wars breaking out over conflict between government and citizen. Something making this play still very relevant thirteen years on. A Number addresses the concept of human cloning, something that is still rife for debate today where questions over the morality of cloning still arise. There is strong religious opposition to cloning and the use of genetic engineering as a basic concept and Far Away was written at a time when cloning was very much in the news regularly. For example, the debate over the cloning of Dolly the sheep, an overall success although with a reduced lifespan, and the creation of human embryos at Advanced Cell Technology in the US had given rise to huge controversy over the potential for human cloning. Controversy is not simply reserved to the tabloid press, it is in circles of religion, government and even in medicine and science itself. Clonaid is a human cloning company foundered in 1997 which had begun to make claims around the time of Churchills writing about the first cloned human girl due to be born in December 2002 and this could have been an influence on Churchills writing, although these claims appear very tentative. In 2001, the US began the passing of a bill making it illegal to "perform or attempt to perform human cloning participate in an attempt to perform human cloning (or) ship or receive for any purpose an embryo produced by human cloning or any product derived from such embryo."

Subject Tutor: Rebecca Lewis-Verebelyi Student Name: Reece Fitzgerald

Summer Homework 1

A2 Drama & Theatre Studies Summer Homework Reece Fitzgerald

The theme of human cloning has been used over and over and still exists in films such as the 2005 movie The Island starring Ewan McGregor. Aside from the very real consequences that could exist with human cloning, there is a real entertainment value in the topic that I think Caryl Churchill managed to tap into, leading to the successful creation of a BBC television broadcast of the play.

TASK 2 PREVIOUS PRODUCTIONS OF THE PLAYS

Far Away Original Production 2000:
A new Caryl Churchill play is an event. So too is a production by Stephen Daldry. Put them together and you are bound to get something remarkable. But although this 50-minute play about a descent into the dark ages' shocks and surprises, it moves from the real to the surreal in ways I found less than convincing. The first scene, however, is a model of dramatic writing - one in which Churchill ratchets up the tension line by line. We are somewhere in the countryside: to judge by Ian MacNeil's front-cloth, with its soft undulations, one assumes it to be England. But it is night and a young girl, Joan, is questioning the aunt with whom she is staying. Joan, it seems, has crept out of the house on hearing a shriek. The aunt tries to provide rational explanations. She says the cry came from an owl, only for Joan to retort, "It was more like a person screaming." Gradually, we realise that the child has witnessed an act of horror involving lorries, blood, the battering of children. Imagine The Secret Garden rewritten by Pinter and you get some idea of the power of this first scene. It has much to do with the young girl's remorseless interrogation; also with the fear that children, as well as being victims of violence, are corrupted by implication in it. But Annabelle Seymour-Julen's remarkably level gaze as Joan, Linda Bassett's stonewalling defensiveness as the aunt and Daldry's use of something as simple as a light switched off and on add to the sense of prickly unease. Thereafter the tension eases slightly. We watch the older Joan and a male colleague making exotic hats in a tyrannised factory: not, we discover, for a fashion show but for a grisly parade. And we end up with a vision of a planet consumed by conflict in which not merely every country is enlisted but also every species of animal and even the elements themselves. It is apocalyptic and unnerving but the journey from the farmhouse reality of the first scene to the cosmic chaos of the last is too swift to be dramatically convincing. It reminds me, if anything, of Sarah Kane's Blasted, which I know Churchill admired but which strikes me as a questionable prototype. Churchill's best effects are achieved through the sudden injection of shock words that set off seismic disturbances. Daldry's production and McNeil's design also typically achieve epic effects in a tiny space, not least when a small army of manacled prisoners is paraded across the stage. And, in the hat-making scene, Katherine Tozer as the older Joan and Kevin McKidd as her partner marvellously counterpoint growing emotion with the physical action of stretching, teasing and steam-pressing their milliners' cloth. The evening constantly astonishes. But, while I am prepared to accept Churchill's thesis that we are slowly sliding into barbarism, I would prefer the case to be argued rather than presented as a dramatic given.

Subject Tutor: Rebecca Lewis-Verebelyi Student Name: Reece Fitzgerald

Summer Homework 2

A2 Drama & Theatre Studies Summer Homework Reece Fitzgerald

Far Away Pro Production 2010:

It's OK not to like Caryl Churchills Far Away. To be frustrated by it, irritated by it, angry with it even. Its short (50 minutes), disjointed, by turns opaque and obvious, derivative and original, clean and messy. Its its own thing but what, exactly? Whatever it is, you cant ignore it. First seen in November 2000, the play feels like a millennial warning shot which, after a violent decade, is still ricochetting off current events. It cant help mattering because its about what human beings will do to each other, about how badly things can get out of hand and about the way those who wash their hands of responsibility get engulfed by the consequences. Using the trappings of a nasty fairy tale, Churchill takes us from vaguely recognisable, recorded horrors intimations of Auschwitz and Bosnia in the first two thirds into a deranged dystopia where nature, seized by runaway global enmity, has turned on itself: the wasps have been killing horses, the cats have come in on the side of the French and so on. Trust is melting into thin air. Absurd, of course, tosh even, but not so easy to laugh off, whatever your fears about where military science will take us next. Director Simon Godwin knows that this is a tough assignment. Take it too seriously and you get theatrical portentousness. Approach it in too flip a fashion and it could dwindle away into insubstantiality. With the help of Shunt designer Lizzie Clachan and an eerie soundscape from Christopher Shutt, he gives the action a fabulous dark-edged feel, exploiting the full scope of the Old Vics stage and its capacity for surprise. Above all, he has his actors hold true to each moment, keeping a straight face but eschewing earnestness. Annette Badland is fantastic as the floral-skirted Harper, who reassures her suspicious niece that theres nothing to worry about in the woods outside, changing her tune in the face of contradiction, her eyes watchful, shifty, guilty as hell. Cara Horgan plays the girl in later years, blithely working in a sinister hat factory on ornate creations for a parade of condemned prisoners (a chilling scene perfectly executed with the help of local amateurs). Tristan Sturrock is her co-worker and lover Todd, collaborating on those cat-walk concoctions while whining about wages. Such is life in the face of other peoples death? Godwin, whose sterling efforts gloss over the plays weaker elements and maximise its strengths, convinces you that maybe, grimly, it is.

Subject Tutor: Rebecca Lewis-Verebelyi Student Name: Reece Fitzgerald

Summer Homework 3

A2 Drama & Theatre Studies Summer Homework Reece Fitzgerald

A Number Original Production 2002:

Direction: Stephen Daldry; Design: Ian MacNeil; Costume Design: Joan Wadge; Lighting: Rick Fisher; Sound:Ian Dickinson Cast: Daniel Craig, Michael Gambon Rarely in my theatre-going experience has a new play conveyed such a disturbing or enthralling impression of domestic weirdness that some families may endure in a not entirely hypothetical future. A Number by Caryl Churchill is the first true play of the 21st century. Its an hour-long experiment in prediction, a meditation upon identity, a sort of nightmare imagining of what the magic of science, in relation to cloning, may one day require of our hearts and minds. Might not, however; as A Number suggests, nurture triumph over Natures help-mate the cloning procedure? If many copies of a human could be made might not all of them still be different under the skin: might not their minds and personalities develop according to the circumstances in which they were reared? Ian MacNeils bare, blank design a wooden square built over the stage floor has no relations to domestic realism. Life floats free. You imagine the place where Sir Michael Gambons moustached Salter; wearing an ordinary suit and an extraordinary expression of distracted furtivenes, welcomes Daniel Craig as his anxious, middle-class thirtysomething son B2 in clone-speak, or Bernard. The language is futuristic too sentences incomplete, compressed, abbreviated in a kind of shortish hand. Salter, a duplicitous, Ibsenish figure with a past., claims B2 is an adored clone, created after his wife and first son were killed in a car-crash. As for the scientists who built too many clones, perhaps compensation is the answer. But then Miss Churchill stages her first terrific coup de theatre and the supposedly dead son appears Daniel Craig in threatening, cockney mode. Salter changes his story about cloning with quite disastrous repercussions. The practice of human cloning offers according to his magical, mystery tour of the future, a way for a delinquent parent to cancel his mistakes. Stephen Daldrys wonderful production, rich in images of father-son tenderness, tension and grief, is dominated by Craig. With eloquent, economic emotional touches he makes the son and two clones distinct individuals. And Sir Michael, although a little too stagey, powerfully expresses Salters rueful anxiety. Its an astonishing event.

Subject Tutor: Rebecca Lewis-Verebelyi Student Name: Reece Fitzgerald

Summer Homework 4

A2 Drama & Theatre Studies Summer Homework Reece Fitzgerald

A Number Pro Production 2010:

Caryl Churchill's astonishing play raises many issues: the meaning of identity, the conflict between nature and nurture, the ethics of cloning. But, by casting Timothy and Samuel West opposite each other, as it did at the Sheffield Crucible in 2006, Jonathan Munby's production focuses on the fraught intimacy of father-son relationships. In five cryptically engrossing scenes, Churchill shows a troubled patriarch, Salter, confront three of his supposed offspring. Bernard One, the psychologically maimed product of a single-parent upbringing, is the authentic original. From the cells of this child, a doctor has created the more pacific Bernard Two, and gone on to clone another 20 sons, one of whom Salter apprehensively meets. But even this is to simplify a non-linear work in which big ideas are explored through a series of dynamic encounters. Churchill asks what the source is of the self, and suggests it has more to do with environment than genetics. The real drama, however, resides in the way ingrained lies are gradually exposed, and in the father's guilt: he tells his original son, whom he put into care, he was "this disgusting thing", yet so perfect he wanted him artificially reproduced. Timothy West presents us with a figure plagued by doubt, insecurity and fear. Samuel West crisply differentiates the three "sons", suggesting variations on Lenny, Joey and Teddy in Pinter's The Homecoming. This is superb acting from West pere et fils.

Subject Tutor: Rebecca Lewis-Verebelyi Student Name: Reece Fitzgerald

Summer Homework 5