• Reflections on seeing the latest Caryl Churchill play, What If If Only

• I view Churchill as one of our greatest playwrights

• My thoughts cross through the multiverse and death

• Passing through children, Tyler Cowen and OpenSpace participatory meetings

Death is on my mind.  So is the multiverse. 

Death is on my mind as I recently talked to Clare Montagu about what it is like to run a hospice through COVID.*

How we should speak plainly on death. 

Death is on my mind as Anoushka has reflected that death has challenged the thinking of my autistic 12 year old son* and my youngest questioned death early.

Death is on my mind as my latest performance piece is about How We Die.*

Death seems to be on the mind of SOMEONE in Caryl Churchill’s play, What If If Only. 

Even more than death the play asks What If … ? 

This is a question humans ask ourselves. 

My 9 year old embodies this when asking and debating the multiverse 

What if What if What if  …? 

It’s not only the Marvel superhero multiverse (and the recent series What If… straiing the Watcher). Consequentialist philosophers and the like think through the implications of What Ifs. The small changes that might mean, for instance, Hitler was never born. Before the big splashy Marvel multiverse, we had Sliding Doors in popular culture. A 1998 film that might have escaped today’s 20 somethings, but probably not Churchill.

This fantasy and science fiction tends to teach to be wary of tampering the timeline.

A podcast host, Auren Hoffman, asks* in the year 2021

…what advice do you wish you could have told your younger self?

Tyler Cowen answers 

That when I get to be older, don't give me any advice. Because look, for me, things have gone pretty well. So there's always the risk with advice. Even if you make a local improvement, you'll screw up the global path. Things have gone well, of course, you could have done better. But again, type one and type two error. Let's let that one sit. So no advice.

…advice is dangerous, how well can you predict other people's paths? Advice maybe is overrated. 

I think a lot of advice is a placebo. The person asks for advice because they want the feeling they've done everything possible, before doing what they're going to do anyway. No, I don't mind that. But once you realize that it's like advice, I don't necessarily think advice is advice, it’s helping the person process their own mental and emotional state.

SOMEONE meditates on death - whines morosely - and conjures  the FUTURE. 

The FUTURE declares  

I’m a ghost of a dead future

… 

Dont Dont Dont let them all in. Of course there's so many so many features that didn't happen like drops of rain grains of sand atoms in your heart. You’ll have no peace if they all come after you and I'm the best I'm a brilliant Future and I could easily have happened but stupid stupid caps choosing the wrong things and let me die. I'm a future you'd really like, everyone would have like me if I happened. 

SOMEONE  Because you're what?

Equality and cake and no bad bits at all and I've been glimpsed I've been died for in China and Russia and South America and here here in little country's history long ago people wanted me they want me over and over and forty fifty years ago I had friends I really nearly and my enemy say I'm utopia and nowhere place and I'm not I needn't be perfect but better better than what and I never happened and if I had happened this nasty desk wouldn't have I'm the one why wouldn't I promise and you've got to make me real you got to make me a real live 

In calling to the dead, SOMEONE is activating the problems of the multiverse

Of wishful thinking. 

Aside. Note Churchill’s use of words. Not the extreme truncation of certain previous works. No “ / “ notation. But a careful use of punctuation, repetition - poetic - in that condensed use of language, words and sound.  This gives a hint on the page of how an actor transforms this.

In Top Girls, Churchill poses questions on the role of women through history. 

In Serious Money, Churchill satires finance and our relationship with money. 

In A Number, she provokes on identity, genetics and cloning.

In Blue Heart the very form of the play speaks to the impossibility of completion and understanding.

Churchill takes human concepts and ideas and embodies them in theatre.

For me (I supposed I can only speak for me,and then am I even sure?)  What If If Only meditates on death, crosses the multiverse and ends up

With PRESENT and FUTURE with SOMEONE stuck not quite letting go of the past 

“gone but I can’t quite stop talking to you yet”

Says SOMEONE in the second last speech in the play. 

As the CHILD FUTURE declares 

I’m going to happen. 

In an Open Space meeting we are guided*

Whoever comes are the right people.

Wherever it happens is the right place.

Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.

Whenever it starts is the right time.

When it is over, it is over.

I’m left with this reflection

When it comes to death and what ifs

Speak plainly and let go. 

Lukowshi writes in TimeOut:

But what does it mean? Clarity is never a given with Churchill, but in some ways ‘What If If Only’ is fairly straightforward: it’s about feeling somebody’s absence so profoundly that it warps your sense of reality, and it’s about reality answering back. It’s a fever-dream morality tale about the dangers of daring to challenge the absurdity of the universe.

Or it could mean something else entirely. But to unduly worry about explaining Churchill – who has never given an interview about her plays – is to perhaps miss the point. Her work operates at a low frequency – visceral, emotional, gut-level – and a high one – abstract, cerebral, unknowable. The space between, where most drama lives, simply doesn’t interest her. Long-term collaborator James McDonald’s production is moving, cryptic, funny, terrifying and ridiculous. There is nobody like Caryl Churchill and it’s hard to think of any writer in history so completely on top of their game at her age. It’s just 20 minutes, but it contains whole worlds.

Although Clive Davis for the Times was thoroughly confused.

*On running a hospice: https://www.thendobetter.com/arts/2021/10/3/clare-montagu-running-a-hospice-during-the-pandemic-how-to-die-well-and-being-a-special-advisor-to-government

*Our children thinking on death: https://spitting-yarn.com/blog/2021/10/1/the-audacity-of-death

*Open Space: https://www.devotedanddisgruntled.com/about-open-space-technology

*My performance piece on death (and climate):  https://www.thendobetter.com/thinking-bigly

*Auren and Tyler on podcast(mostly on organisational capital: https://www.safegraph.com/podcasts/tyler-cowen-identifying-talent-measuring-organizational-capital

Running at the Royal Court, London. Until 23 Oct. 6pm and 10pm, 20 minutes run time.