If Caryl Churchill were a runner, she would hold gold medals for both the 100- and 10,000-metre races. Long-distance pieces (Top Girls, Serious Money) alternate with sprint scripts: What If If Only, a new play at the Royal Court in September, is predicted to last 14 minutes. Later Churchill has also featured meaty evenings – Love and Information and Glass.Kill.Bluebeard.Imp – comprised of short pieces.
Director James Haddrell fascinatingly explores the dramatist’s middle distance by bringing together four of the 10 texts collected in a 1990 anthology, Caryl Churchill: Shorts.
Seagulls is a 1978 theatre piece unstaged for decades because the writer thought the story of an elusive superpower was too bald a metaphor for writer’s block. Now, it seems an intriguing reflection on urgent concerns – celebrity and credulity.
Most familiar is 1980’s Three More Sleepless Nights, where four characters (in different combinations) occupy a double bed that hosts none of the most common activities – sleep, sex, death – though comes close to featuring one of these. An early workout for the writer’s now signature overlapping dialogue, this remarkable play is Churchill’s darkest hour.
In a pair of two 50-year-old radio plays, Abortive, another argument between a non-sleeping couple, feels too slight for its themes of female sexual and reproductive jeopardy. Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen is, though, a rich curiosity. Originally imagining a far-off 2010, it feels unnervingly current in depicting a respiratory crisis in a society also tensed against terrorism.
In that play, someone written as Claude becomes Claudia, but Churchill’s prescient tendency to leave characterisation fluid allows varied opportunities to six fine actors. Gracy Goldman excels as a twice unhappy lover in the double bed, and Verna Vyas finds clarity in the daringly repetitive dialogue of the dystopian drama.
The old Radio 3 plays were originally directed by a crucial early Churchill champion, John Tydeman, who died last year, making this show both a memorial to him and a celebration of the restless and prolific originality of a great dramatist.
Bad Nights and Odd Days is at Greenwich theatre, London, until 10 July
