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But not that : Caryl Churchill’s political shape shifting at the turn of the millennium

Originally given as a keynote address at the international Caryl Churchill symposium and festival hosted by Lincoln University in 2011, this article analyses Churchill’s political shape shifting at the turn of the millennium, when ideological resistance to capitalism has all but disappeared. Positioning This Is a Chair (1997) as a critical-political turning point in Churchill’s repertoire, it argues that René Magritte’s visual thinking about the arbitrary relation of words and things is seminal to Churchill’s struggle to create a political-theatre canvas. Coupling this with Far Away (2000), I demonstrate how Churchill’s critique of global capitalism involves a dissolve – the appearing, yet disappearing, traces of the Brechtian dramaturgy of her earlier playwriting, and a renewal of the epic through a composition that is both experiential and elliptical. Ultimately, the article argues that the need to impress on audiences the urgency of dis-identifying with capitalism informs Churchill’s political perspective through a dialectic shift from Herbert Blau’s “imminence of a ‘not-yet’” to the negative of “but not that.”