Here We Go (play)

Here We Go is a 2015 play by Caryl Churchill. Critics' reviews were generally positive.

Here We Go
Written byCaryl Churchill
Date premiered27 November 2015 (2015-11-27)
Place premieredRoyal National Theatre
Original languageEnglish
SubjectAgeing, death

Reception

Lettie McKie wrote in Londonist that "its brevity does nothing to lessen the gentle emotional power". McKie criticized the dialogue of the funeral scene as stilted "due to Churchill's decision to truncate many of her characters' sentences. Paradoxically, the actors' discomfort shows as they struggle with a trick intended to create naturalism." But the critic described the overall play as "true to life, graceful, and unique".[1] Variety's Matt Trueman's said of the final scene ("Getting There"), "Craftily, Churchill coaxes us into contemplating our own mortality." Trueman also called Churchill's writing in the second scene "wry".[2] Mark Lawson of New Statesman wrote of the finale, "Feeling as if it were staring the audience down, the scene is a terrifyingly unconsoling meditation on the end of life, as if Ingmar Bergman had turned Larkin's 'Aubade' and 'The Old Fools' into a silent movie. [...] I found the play rewardingly sharp and shocking".[3]

Michael Billington of The Guardian wrote, "While initially it seems slight, I find it’s grown steadily in the mind since I saw it." He said that the third section ("Getting There") "poignantly captures the ritual humiliations of sickness and age", and dubbed the play "a striking memento mori for an age without faith".[4] Verity Healey of Exeunt argued, "Life seems so brief and yet so expansive. And Churchill’s style of writing follows suit with its short, truncated sentences as she untangles, in an essayist fashion, the meaning of existence, its cessation and our helpless but natural struggle against it." Healey said that the "last section, which unravels in dialogue-less repetition, has plenty to say about old age and how time, like sundown, is slow, almost imperceptible yet unstoppable."[5] Rohan Preston billed Here We Go and the later Churchill play Escaped Alone as "slight but potent" works.[6][7]

gollark: Also poor error handling.
gollark: You are forgetting C's total lack of safety.
gollark: I try and make all my stuff reasonably Unicode-capable so that people who write in non-ASCII languages could somewhat use it.
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gollark: Native UTF-8 strings with UTF-8ness enforced.

References
  1. McKie, Lettie (2015-11-28). "Review: Caryl Churchill's New Play About The End Of Life". Londonist. Retrieved 2020-06-04.
  2. Trueman, Matt (2015-11-30). "London Theater Review: Caryl Churchill's 'Here We Go'". Variety. Retrieved 2020-06-04.
  3. Lawson, Mark (2015-12-10). "Caryl Churchill's Here We Go: Eight actors in search of an ending". New Statesman. Retrieved 2020-06-05.
  4. Billington, Michael (2015-11-29). "Here We Go review – Caryl Churchill's chilling reminder of our mortality". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2020-06-04.
  5. Healey, Verity (2015-11-29). "Here We Go". Exeunt Magazine. Retrieved 2020-06-04.
  6. Hewitt, Chris (2019-09-26). "Onstage spotlight: "Excaped Alone/Here We Go" ends at Gremlin Theatre". Star Tribune. Retrieved 2020-06-04.
  7. Preston, Rohan (2019-09-11). "What's it like to die? Frank Theatre stages two Caryl Churchill one-acts". Star Tribune. Retrieved 2020-06-04.
For more information, see Caryl Churchill.
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