Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? ( Archived )

Reviews

DRUNK ENOUGH TO SAY I LOVE YOU? REHEARSAL PHOTOGRAPHS

From left to right: Caryl Churchill, Ty Burrell and Stephen Dillane

Caryl Churchill, Ty Burrell and Stephen Dillane

Stephen Dillane

Ty Burrell and Stephen Dillane

Photographer: Stephen Cummiskey 4 stars Four Stars

Michael Billington, The Guardian, 24/11/2006

Caryl Churchill’s new play certainly puts an original spin on the “special relationship”. Its brilliant conceit is to use a male love affair as a metaphor for the tortured submissiveness of Britain to America over foreign policy. While I applaud the play’s intentions, it is almost too ingeniously elliptical to ram home its arguments.

Churchill presents us with two guys sitting on a sofa: Sam (as in Uncle) and Jack (as in Union). They might even be Bush and Blair. And what is startling is the sexualisation of politics. The two men coitally bond over military diplomacy, regime change, rigged elections, biological warfare and much else. But Sam demands a “total commitment” that Jack, who has left his family for his lover, cannot give. And Jack’s nagging qualms finally surface over carbon emissions, which, it is implied, may put an end to the affair.

I love the idea of the play. And Churchill pursues her premise with rigorous emotional logic. Jack constantly harps on the sacrifices he has made to be with Sam, with domestic ties neatly symbolising party principles. Sam, for his part, is bullish, dominating and unyielding. It is genuinely funny to see the way a dispute about trade tariffs is played out as a lovers’ tiff, with Sam defending himself against charges of bad faith by saying: “Come on, we’ve done debt cancellation here.”

Like Pinter in his political plays, Churchill nails American double-think and manipulation of language. However, while the two men, like intimate partners, complete each other’s sentences, the compacted speech sometimes leaves arguments hanging in the air. It’s a short, 50-minute play that you almost need to hear twice, or read, to get the full force of Churchill’s accusations. And it is significant that only when Sam gets a rare, uninterrupted speech about torture practices do you feel the weight of Churchill’s moral rage.

The piece is skilfully staged by James Macdonald, with the sofa rising ever higher as the two men increasingly lose contact with reality. Ty Burrell’s Sam has a wonderful thrusting aggressiveness as he argues that democracy doesn’t always work out as hoped – “So now we need to prevent some elections.” And Stephen Dillane’s Blairite Jack has exactly the right mix of capitulation and lurking conscience. Having dealt in the past with the politics of sex, Churchill here puts the sexuality of politics centre stage. 5 stars Five Stars

Nicholas De Jongh, Evening Standard, 23/11/2006

What shock appeal Caryl Churchill’s latest flight into theatrical fantasy generates! Two male lovers, one prepared to leave his wife and children for his new, special relationship, sit on a sofa, talking of foreign affairs as America has violently practised them from Vietnam to today. They go no further than gazing into each other’s eyes, a little mutual knee touching and, once, one rests in head in the other’s lap. This, though, is a politically motivated allegory, a theatrical depth charge a tirade against the thrust of America’s foreign policy and Tony Blair’s obsequious support of George Bush in Iraq.

Inspired by cartoonists, stand-up comedians and commentators who have likened Blair’s relationship with Bush to a love affairs, Churchill takes an imaginative leap into allegorical fantasy. In DRUNK ENOUGH TO SAY I LOVE YOU?, Stephen Dillane impressively plays diffident, charming Jack, as in Union Jack, who becomes sexually captivated by Ty Burrell’s riveting, hunky, fearful Sam, as in America’s Uncle Sam, who is half in love with torture too.

Jack voices his support for a host of our allies’ interventions abroad and reveals himself bound, ideologically not literally, in a sadomasochistic relationship with his lover. He echoes his Master’s Voice on America’s decades-long programme of dirty tricks abroad – the black propaganda policy changes over Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein, not to mention gases, poisons, torture programmes and bombs assisting these ventures. He vainly tries to escape his lover’s domination, going home after daring to disagree on Israel, but abjectly returns to offer ‘the total commitment’ demanded of him. When, however, Jack challenges Sams laissez-faire policy over global warming and the American is left vainly chanting ‘love me, you have to love me,’ the spell is broken.

Churchill makes this relationship of control and submission serve as a scathing analogy and critique of Blair’s attitude to America. The black comedy might, however, have seemed a monotonously one-sided tirade, had not Churchill written it in fascinatingly strange, elliptic speech, fragmentary, incomplete phrases of telegraphese. You need listen closely to understand.

In James MacDonald’s beautifully composed and acted production, the sofa on which the men sit is suspended in the air, as if suggesting – not that when Sam feeds Jack cocaine – that the men float high above reality’s hold. An astonishing piece of theatre. 4 stars Four Stars

Michael Coveney, Whats On Stage, 23/11/2006

Caryl Churchill’s new play is like an explosive capsule, left on the stage to undermine our state of well-being. It also makes you feel helpless, limp with outrage and beset with insignificance. It is just 45 minutes long, but it contains a cosmology of experience in the fractious love affair between two men who run the world.

One in American, the other is British. One is Sam, as in Uncle, the other Jack, as in Union. They speak in unfinished sentences, of several words each. They are suspended in space on a sofa, which rises higher with their acceleration of plans and policies. Sam is an important member government official. Jack, whom he met in a bar and can hardly remember, is a family man, torn between domestic loyalty and the ultimate dependency that the surge of power and protection brings.

Theirs is, indeed, ‘a special relationship,’ which thrives on intervention and aggressive intent. The word ‘democracy’ is never mentioned. Nor are ‘moral values’ or the idea that the coalition of interests is in some way representative of decency, freedom or civilisation. There is, of course, ‘a threat to our security.’ If the writing were less clever than it is it would be easy, therefore, to say the piece merely reiterated a common perception of American foreign policy, supported by a cowed and fawning Britain, being an unthinking, power-crazy force for evil. You may conclude that Caryl Churchill retains this view, and that the Royal Court is an accomplice to her opinion. But this would mean that her writing lacks the impact of dramatic metaphor and true theatrical expression.

It doesn’t, of course. But I will admit that, after seeing the play, I read the script twice before coming to my conclusions. Like A NUMBER, her last play about a parental relationship and the cloning of children, the play is dense, fast, elliptical, superficially baffling and finally rewarding. No other writer can achieve what Churchill now does, which is to convey a universe of feeling in a minimal, stripped back artistry. Though completely dissimilar to Beckett and Pinter, she is surely now in their class in this respect. Only one speech extends beyond two lines, that of Sam when Jack has temporarily abandoned him – about the techniques of torture.

The catalogue of intervention is relentless and dizzying: the scare tactics in Chile and Nicaragua, the blocking of elections all over the place, the storage of nuclear weapons in seven European countries, the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons and cluster bombs, the official collusion in drug-running operations and vote-rigging. The towers have been destroyed but Saddam is not yet destabilised. The best is yet to come.

James MacDonald’s production is a model of fast-paced clarity and concentration and the design – the stage is lit around its proscenium frame with innumerable light bulbs – is the work of Eugene Lee, whose other current London show is Wicked, a quite different sort of paean to American culture and politics. Ty Burrell, an American actor with a history of Churchill credits, is faultlessly smooth and dynamic as Sam, while Stephen Dillane’s Jack of all trades catches exactly a sense of confusion overtaken by excitement.