Andrew Haydon
posted 29 November 2006

Jack and Sam sit and discuss their relationship on a sofa. Over the course of the play's 45-minute duration, this sofa gradually floats higher and higher into the air between scenes - seemingly suspended in thin air. Middle-aged, English Jack tells his younger, fitter, American lover, Sam, that he has decided to leave his wife and children for him. Rather than discussing their relationship in the usual terms, Sam and Jack's conversation is conducted almost entirely through elliptical discussion of British and American foreign policy since World War II. Being Caryl Churchill, it seems reasonable to expect that (Union?) Jack and (Uncle?) Sam are not intended simply as direct ciphers for either their respective countries or for Bush 'n' Blair, but it becomes a conclusion that is harder and harder to resist as the play unfolds.

Watching the play increasingly feels like being bashed over the head with the Big Bible of Leftie Truisms, including the books of Western Foreign Policy Is Evil, Economic Globalisation Is Bad, Big Pharma Is Wicked, Climate Change Is All Our Fault and Consumerism Is Very Nasty. Regardless of your politics, you will have heard all this before, very likely from the same sources that Churchill re-hashes. If you already agree, you may find much to commend, but if you aren't already persuaded by the arguments, Drunk Enough… offers precious little to change your mind. The play fails to even touch upon the positive achievements of the West since 1945, or give an alternative perspective.

Perhaps the political material is intended simply to be secondary to the consideration of the relationship. It is possible that Churchill thinks the contentious claims of the script act as analogues for the state of this relationship built on manipulation - suggesting that many relationships operate on unequal terms. Perhaps by making both partners male, she is only seeking to remove gender considerations from this dissection of power-balances within relationships, rather than offering the uncomfortable option that one of the play's central metaphors, wittingly or unwittingly, is 'Britain is being fucked in the arse by America'. One would dearly love such crude metaphor to be unintended, but it is hard to ignore the possibility when it appears to be so literally presented.

Beyond this, the way Churchill cuts both beginnings and ends of sentences, giving an increasingly elliptical glimpse of what its being said, is stylish, and the writing itself is elegant, but nothing compared with the elaborate linguistic games of earlier plays such as Blue Kettle or Far Away. It is hard to fault the production, though. Stephen Dillane turns in a brilliant performance as the nervy, Blair-like, Englishman - at once convincing as both a man in love and a troubled conscience, while his American counterpart Ty Burrell creates a believably manipulative, but ultimately petulant and needy American. The floating settee is a nice touch, and the magically appearing and disappearing cups and props are a clever conceit. Interestingly, amidst the often stomach-turning descriptions of torture methods, allegedly deployed by the West and her allies in the War Against Terror, the only whole-audience gasp of the night came the first time Jack suddenly dropped his coffee cup off the edge of his floating settee, only for it to disappear noiselessly into the surrounding void. It is, it seems, easier to get a theatre audience to audibly care about a single cup than about the fates of untold millions around the globe.

For years, Caryl Churchill has been one of Britain's most imaginative, challenging and inventive playwrights, but here it appears that she has written a reductive anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-American polemic, without much invention or subtlety about it. Irrespective of their politics, audiences deserve better than a thinly-disguised, one-sided lecture on a clever set, no matter how well performed or how beautifully crafted the writing may be.

Alternatively; there was a (wholly unsubstantiated) rumour that when Churchill heard the Royal Court was staging a play by arch-conservative Tom Stoppard to mark its fifty year anniversary, she came very close to withdrawing her own planned play. In the light of this, it becomes all too attractive to view Drunk Enough To Say I Love You? as a satire on Rock 'n' Roll's romantic-comedy exaltation of the overthrow of the Eastern Bloc and the triumph of capitalism, expressing disgust at the crimes and tactics of the winning side, it suddenly starts looking very clever indeed. Taken in isolation, Drunk Enough... seems perversely one-sided, but viewed as a companion piece to Rock 'n' Roll, it begins to sound a lot more like the other side of a much longer debate.

Till 22 December 2006.

Andrew Haydon can be heard on theatreVOICE discussing new writing with director Roxana Silbert, young writers James Graham and Duncan Macmillan, critics Lyn Gardner and Aleks Sierz, and Royal Court young writers programme administrator Claire Birch.