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    Caryl Churchill

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    Maria
    Val has asked Frank to kill her in the play "Fen" by Caryl Churchill. In a monologue, Val describes encountering many ghosts after her death, including a girl who died of starvation along with her baby during a harsh winter, waiting desperately for the coming of spring. Val sees the ghosts of other dead people and cannot block them out. One ghost is a girl who became strangely beautiful in the spring after nearly dying, but was found dead like a cowslip flower. The extract concludes with Val describing another character, Becky, having a nightmare about being chased.

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    Caryl Churchill

    Uploaded by

    Maria
    533 views2 pages
    Val has asked Frank to kill her in the play "Fen" by Caryl Churchill. In a monologue, Val describes encountering many ghosts after her death, including a girl who died of starvation along with her baby during a harsh winter, waiting desperately for the coming of spring. Val sees the ghosts of other dead people and cannot block them out. One ghost is a girl who became strangely beautiful in the spring after nearly dying, but was found dead like a cowslip flower. The extract concludes with Val describing another character, Becky, having a nightmare about being chased.

    Original Description:

    Monologue from Fen

    Original Title

    Fen

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    © © All Rights Reserved

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    Val has asked Frank to kill her in the play "Fen" by Caryl Churchill. In a monologue, Val describes encountering many ghosts after her death, including a girl who died of starvation along with her baby during a harsh winter, waiting desperately for the coming of spring. Val sees the ghosts of other dead people and cannot block them out. One ghost is a girl who became strangely beautiful in the spring after nearly dying, but was found dead like a cowslip flower. The extract concludes with Val describing another character, Becky, having a nightmare about being chased.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    533 views2 pages

    Caryl Churchill

    Uploaded by

    Maria
    Val has asked Frank to kill her in the play "Fen" by Caryl Churchill. In a monologue, Val describes encountering many ghosts after her death, including a girl who died of starvation along with her baby during a harsh winter, waiting desperately for the coming of spring. Val sees the ghosts of other dead people and cannot block them out. One ghost is a girl who became strangely beautiful in the spring after nearly dying, but was found dead like a cowslip flower. The extract concludes with Val describing another character, Becky, having a nightmare about being chased.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 2

    an extract from

    Fen
    VAL: There’s so much happening. There’s all those people and I know about
    them. There’s a girl who died. I saw you put me in the wardrobe, I was up
    by the ceiling, I watched. I could have gone but I wanted to stay with you
    and I found myself coming back in.
    There’s so many of them all at once. He drowned in the river carrying his
    torch and they saw the light shining up through the water.
    There’s that girl again, a long time ago when they believed in boggarts.
    The boy died of measles in the first war.
    The girl, I’ll try and tell you about her and keep the others out. A lot of
    children died that winter and she’s still white and weak though it’s nearly
    time to wake the spring — stand at the door at dawn and when you see
    a green mist rise from the fields you throw out bread and salt, and that
    gets the boggarts to make everything grow again. She’s getting whiter
    and sillier and she wants the spring. She says maybe the green mist will
    make her strong so every day they’re waiting for the green mist.
    I can’t keep them out. Her baby died starving. She died starving. Who?
    She says if the green mist don’t come tomorrow she can’t wait. ‘If I could
    see spring again I wouldn’t ask to live longer than one of the cowslips at
    the gate,’ The mother says, ‘Hush, the boggarts’ll hear you.’
    Next day, the green mist. It’s sweet, can you smell it? Her mother carries
    her to the door. She throws out the bread and salt. The earth is awake.
    Every day she’s stronger, the cowslips are budding, she’s running
    everywhere. She’s so strange and beautiful they can hardly look. Is that
    all? A boy talks to her at the gate. He picks a cowslip without much
    noticing. ‘Did you pick that?’
    She’s a wrinkled white dead thing like the cowslip.
    There’s so many, I can’t keep them out. They’re not all dead. There’s
    someone crying in her sleep. It’s Becky.
    She’s having a nightmare. She’s running downstairs away from Angela.
    She’s out on the road but she can’t run fast enough. She’s running on
    her hands and feet to go faster, she’s swimming up the road, she’s trying
    to fly but she can’t get up because Angela’s after her, and she gets to
    school and sits down at her desk. But the teacher’s Angela. She comes
    nearer. But she knows how to wake herself up, she’s done it before, she
    doesn’t run away, she must hurl herself at Angela — jump! jump! and
    she’s falling — but it’s wrong, instead of waking up in bed she’s falling
    into another dream and she’s here.

    Caryl Churchill
    ‘Fen’, written in the 1980s, is about a group of downtrodden women who work in the
    potato fields of East Anglia in England. In this extract from the end of the play Val has
    asked Frank to kill her. In this monologue descibes how her death feels and the ghosts
    of the other dead she meets.
    Caryl Churchill (born 1938) is an English dramatist known for her use of non-naturalistic
    techniques and feminist themes, the abuses of power, and sexual politics. Her best
    known works are ‘Cloud Nine’, ‘Top Girls’, and ‘Serious Money’.
    In 2009 Churchill wrote the controversial Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza a
    10-minute play which was a response to the 2008-2009 Israeli military strike on Gaza.
    You can watch the play on You Tube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYAYnJ6HZ5M
    A biography, bibliography, and critical perspective of Caryl Churchill can be found at:
    www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth259
    Other contemporary British women playwrights whose work is included in the
    Anthology are Shelagh Stephenson, Sarah Kane, Charlotte Keatly, Sharman McDonald,
    and Clare McIntyre.

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