The little Finborough Theatre is widely
recognised to pack an artistic punch out of all proportion to its
commercial weight. Nevertheless, when it announced the world première
of a play by Caryl Churchill, but to be staged only in its subordinate
Sunday-to-Tuesday slot, and with a press night moreover on April 1st
(Easter Monday, yet!), it was hard not to wonder whether the theatre
was playing a long game for April Fool’s.
The play is indeed genuine, but it dates from 1972, some years before
Churchill’s breakthrough and long before the formal adventurousness for
which she is now renowned. It is loosely inspired by the work of
Martinique-born postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, and makes use of
material from his book
The Wretched
Of The Earth describing his work as a psychiatrist in Algeria
during the violent campaign for that country’s independence in the
1950s.
It is, I’m afraid, very much a play of its earnest time. From the first
scene, in which an unbending civil servant and his more conciliatory
but still uncomprehending wife present their schizophrenic daughter to
Fanon, and refuse to let her get a word in edgewise, it is clear that
this sparely written piece is a relentless indictment of the oppressive
colonial society… so much so that I spent some time wondering whether
the members of this family were not themselves emblems of various
sections of Franco-Algerian society. (“He takes his work home with
him,” says Madame, meaning that Monsieur conducts interrogations of
liberationist suspects in the family’s house itself.) Other portraits
include a paranoid, hopelessly narcissistic revolutionary, a police
inspector whose skill at torture is leaking into his domestic
relations, and a complacently collaborationist medical colleague.
Fanon was, as one online source nicely puts it, an opponent of
non-violence; the Algerian FLN’s violent struggle is implicitly
justified time and again. Yet may not such a portfolio of mental
imbalances be, collectively, causes of the violence as much as effects
of it? If so, then on one side only, is the suggestion.
Jim Russell’s production seemed a little under-rehearsed on opening
night (with one or two actors alternately drying and stepping on each
other’s lines), and in general the 90-minute staging serves more as a
footnote to considerations of Churchill and Fanon than as a drama in
its own right.
Written for the Financial
Times.