Here We Go, National theatre, review: Mesmerising sound of silence

Caryl Churchill's short play about death is provocative and startling, says Fiona Mountford
Showing the humiliations and indignities of old age: Patrick Godfrey as the old man
Jane Hobson/Rex
Fiona Mountford30 November 2015

If there's one thing we’ve learnt to expect from Caryl Churchill, it’s the unexpected.

During the last four decades of British playwriting, she has been the great experimenter with form, from the centuries-straddling frolics of Top Girls to the near abstraction of Love and Information, and she continues in this fruitful vein with this startling, short play about death.

The last 15 minutes are wordless; I don’t think I’ve ever sat through such an extended period of silence in a drama before.

Inevitably, some will carp, but I was mesmerised.

Astonishingly for a 40-minute running time, Churchill manages to pack in three vastly differing acts.

In the first, guests mingle after the funeral of an old man. They share sharp, sometimes conflicting recollections about the deceased and step out of the scene to foretell their own ends. “I die 26 years later,” says one.

Next up, it’s the old man (Patrick Godfrey) himself, mulling on the myriad possibilities of the afterlife.

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1/50

Yet it is act three that will get people talking, as we move back in time a little, to a nursing home in which a carer aids the old man. It is here that the confidence and daring of Dominic Cooke’s production shines most brightly.

This trenchant scene speaks, without any language, of the humiliations and indignities of old age; throughout, Godfrey’s expression is one of blank, bleak amazement, as if he cannot believe that his rich, varied, error-strewn, experience-packed life, as discussed at the funeral, can possibly be reduced to this.

Full credit to the National for staging this provocative piece.

Until December 19, National’s Lyttelton, (020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk)

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