Caryl Churchill's Play

Here are two versions of the play I'm covering with the 12th grade HL section presently:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JFpMH963sk

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWKGbjJ7LxE

It's called "Seven Jewish Children, a play for Gaza" by British playwright Caryl Churchill. I asked my students to watch both of these productions and compare them for what each production emphasises. I decided to do the assignment as well, and here's what I've written:

Audiences exposed to both the Jennie Stoller and the Warwick student drama productions of Seven Jewish Children might find themselves deliberating on what makes theater theater. The word theater comes from the Greek word theastrai, which means “to behold”. To behold is to see or observe. By this definition much of life could be considered theater; perhaps that it Churchill’s point. The Stoller production strips many of the elements of traditional drama that we count on to guide our understanding of what we observe, such as lights, sound effects, character development and staging. The Warwick production provides more encouragement for an audience member to draw certain conclusions about what he observes.

The Stoller show is theatrically barren. By removing all bells and whistles from the production, the director emphasizes the words of the script, and makes the audience do all the work of interpreting them. The viewer gets no help in deciding which of the rapidly delivered lines is true. Some are obviously biased, “Tell her she should be proud of the army”, some unsuspicious, “Don’t frighten her”. In between are dozens of lines that the viewer must quickly appraise as true or untrue; he realizes that distinguishing truth from falsehood is not easy. Typically in theater, a line’s truthfulness can be judged based on the known nature of the character who says it (Bosola’s criminal past makes all his lines suspect) or from a lighting, sound, or stage cue that indicates the integrity of the speaker (like Walter’s obvious drunkenness, or Lewis’s sneaky side glances to watch the effect of his lies on the doctors.)

        Stoller’s one-woman performance also emphasizes that one Jewish descendant could be experiencing all these contradictory voices. Her insistent tone at points also reveals the desperation people have, in general, to be in control of how a story is told. The fervor of her inner discussion shows a fear that the truth will be revealed despite whatever the parents decide to “tell her”.

        The Warwick production makes the viewer’s job of interpretation easier by including production elements which encourage the audience to be immediately suspicious of the conversation being held on stage. The darkness and sinister prelude of unintelligible whispers immediately indicates lies and hidden truths. The lamps give a ghostly appearance to the actors, and all deliberations about what to tell and not tell seem to be happening in dimly lit corners, where plots are hatched. In the Stoller production, it was possible to assume the innocence of the speaker; here innocence is not a plausible conclusion, because of the staging.

The multiple actors emphasize that the conflict is more about the parents’ feelings, not the actual dilemma of what to tell the girl (she probably won’t care as much as they do anyway). The discussion about what to tell the daughter is simply the catalyst for a debate about personal feelings on a cultural history, which may not be a topic the parents would bring up unless they were forced to, even if they had a lot to say (and they clearly do).

        The multiple actors also reveal, importantly, that one rancorous comment can fuel someone else’s rancor. At several points one person’s anger seems to provide justification for another person’s even more discriminatory statement. It’s as if one person’s small-mindedness frees another person to be even more bigoted. This is how hate becomes a cultural phenomenon, seen here at the root, in the family unit. Thus Churchill portrays a societal problem on a micro level. This is what Miller does in All My Sons when he shows the generational gap between those who lived through the Great Depression and those who have known only post-war prosperity. He also shows the conflict between capitalist values and citizen ethics within one family. Here, Churchill shows the conflicts that cause division within Israeli society regarding their past, their religion and their politics. The single family is a microcosm of a problem that exists in society at large.

The idea of gender enters the picture in the Warwich production. While sometimes Stoller impersonates a Jewish grandparent, her portrayals are androgynous; here, the men have the roles which most strongly discourage telling the daughter the unadorned truth. The men counsel against encouraging her to desire any form of connection with the Palestinians.

If I didn’t know the situation of Palestine, I would think this play were a simple recounting of Jewish struggles until the final scene, when I would be made very uncomfortable with the declarations of the ranting speaker. Even then, though, I might think the play were making a statement about the dangers of individual extremism, not structural oppression and ongoing power imbalances between nations. Thus either production will promote justice for Palestine only if the audience has some idea of the political leanings of the playwright. When one character says “The whole world knows,” is it unclear which history she is referring to: the injustice committed against the Palestinians, or the Jews’ history? The possibility that she is referring to Palestinian suffering stings any viewer who is aware of how skewed is the world’s perception of the Palestinian narrative. I hope that viewers appreciate the play’s message that the phrases and claims we see splashed across newspapers as if they are incontestable fact, are in fact as flimsy as the one-liners flung across a living room in a domestic debate designed to preempt and silence a child’s legitimate questions.