Nearly 20 years ago, the RSC put on a collection of short Beckett plays, inventively staged by Katie Mitchell like installations in an exhibition. As you walked around them, each scene became an episode on a walk. This is surely a template for the staging of Caryl Churchill’s brief plays. We have had whole days of Shakespeare and Chekhov recently: why not Churchill?
It might help with the challenge posed by Dominic Cooke’s production of Here We Go. The three episodes, which together make up an inquiry into death, last only 45 minutes. Will a big stage make the action look desultory? Actually, the effect is completely idiosyncratic. Each scene begins by looking dwarfed by the space. Yet the images they supply burn on. Days later, they had become part of my visual vocabulary.
Which is the point of the evening: how to fix a flickering moment. “We should all be recorded,” one of the guests declares at a wake, as she circles around others as if at a cocktail party. First they produce their summaries of the dead man’s character, in clipped, annoying dialogue. Then naturalism drops away and each character discloses the time and the cause of his or her own death. Embolism, cancer, dementia – a day or years after the wake – are itemised. And the moment of death itself? “Like stepping on a rake,” explains the beautiful voice of Susan Engel. Which has piquancy. The man at whose wake they gather was a bit of a rake.
The play begins at the end. The second scene features an elderly man, presumably the said rake. Patrick Godfrey is spotlit on a black stage, bare-chested and wild-maned as if he were Robinson Crusoe. He is about to die, and in a torrent of words is considering what is next. If reincarnated, perhaps he will be a flea with “an amazing JUMP”? There is a flash. He is extinguished.
Finally, the life before death. The ritual dance of the old man and his carer (we assume a carer, as she wears a tabard), who together peel off his pyjamas on a bed, carefully put on outdoor clothes, Zimmer him to an armchair, and then immediately start the whole process all over again. And again. It is silent and mesmeric. You don’t have to be aged to recognise its endless repetitions as one summary of life.
