Plays Book

I'd put off finishing this collection with Fen because, honestly, the first page with a Japanese Businessman delivering a monologue in broken English seemed...problematic. Even Churchill, one of the best playwrights there is, can have her dud moments. As much as Top Girls is a standout classic that lives up to its reputation, Serious Money and Softcops were a bit too dense for me, which is my issue with Churchill's plays I like least.

But I love Top Girls, Far Away, Vinegar Tom and Mad Forest, so I was still willing to trust her and read the rest of Fen, with the awareness that it was written in 1983 and not very often revived which, based on my immediate concern, was probably because of its datedness.

This is more on the dense side than accessible but the racist opening sets the wrong tone and can be easily skipped. Fen is a mournful play showing the increased influence of corporate control on farming through the people whose live revolve around their work on the fen.

Val represents this decline, haunted by a bad decision that means she'll never be accepted by the community and everything she dreams of becomes further and further out of reach. That's as close to a plot as I can manage because most of the play is classic Churchill scenes of innocuous conversations that incite you to look fir subtext. This is what makes her work sometimes inscrutable but then you get magic moments like Bell's monologue about a deal her grandfather made with a corpse, morbid and fairytaleesque with a political edge.

So, not my favourite Churchill but not without interest, I'd say its only really for my fellow Churchill obsessives.