A Dream Play at Hull Truck

Hull College's staging of Caryl Churchill's adaptation of Strindberg's A Dream Play asks the question: Where is Paradise? It's certainly not in a Churchill play. And definitely not this one.

In her defence – and it's not often I defend Caryl Churchill – it's not all her fault. The original material is from one August Strindberg, a Swedish playwright (with a fragile grip on reality at the best of times) who was leaving behind his Naturalism phase and heading into his Expressionist phase (via a near-death experience) when he wrote it – basing it around the patterns of, you guessed it, a dream (clue's in the name). That explains rather a lot about A Dream Play. Once you put it through the filter of Churchill – who has an apparent objection to giving her characters anything resembling a context, and here rejects character continuity – and hand it to a young company in a studio space...well, the poor play didn't stand a chance.

This production has failed in overcoming the problems with staging this script – in which (apparently) Agnes the Angel comes down to Earth to find out what it's like being a human (see also: The Bible (Feminist version)) – because they try to make it naturalistic. In the black box, the scenes that they play so straightly all appear in the same place, and there's no sense of movement or of change. But change is crucial to Agnes journey through the nature of humanity; the very essence of (what I shall optimistically call) the story is that she goes from a state of ignorance to knowing all about being human...poor girl.

A poor girl she is, indeed. Agnes' various discoveries – shown in hodgepodge of scenes which are difficult to link together in the mind – lead her to despair of all human life. Considering what she sees, that's no surprise. But if what she sees were somehow to be shown differently... Strindberg wrote the original as a piece of Expressionism, while he was turning his back on all he'd done before, ie. Naturalism. With Churchill thrown into the mix as well, it'd be no bad thing to throw any attempt at Naturalistic staging out of the window and give full vent to any Expressionist – even Absurdist – ideas. It's a script that lends itself to playing with images and concepts, not words and characters.

The main message of Churchill's script – one oft repeated – seems to be: Life is pretty dire, and everyone has problems. Thanks for that pearl, Caryl, thanks...