 |
| A Mouthful of Birds | |
|---|---|
| Written by | Caryl Churchill and David Lan |
| Date premiered | 1986 |
| Subject | Possession, madness, and female violence |
| Genre | Play with dance |
A Mouthful of Birds is a 1986 play with dance, written by Caryl Churchill and David Lan, [1] with choreography by Ian Spink. Drawing its themes from The Bacchae of Euripides, it is a meditation on possession, madness and female violence.
The play has an unusual structure; it is a series of seven independent vignettes each focusing on a different character. After every scene, a moment in the tragedy of Pentheus is seen. Dionysos, a dancer, watches the action invisibly, and his kiss causes each episode's central transformation. At the play's end, the characters return to give epilogues narrating how their stories continued.
The episodes include:
The actors play ensemble roles in all scenes other than their own. Dance sequences are at the center of the episodes involving the pig and his lover, the schizophrenic and her hallucinated tormentor, and the serial killer.
The play's perspective on mental illness and sexuality is strongly influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, who also wrote a monograph on the life of Herculine Barbin, as well as by David Lan's own anthropological work on possession and non-Western religions.
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Caryl Lesley Churchill is a British playwright known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her use of non-naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes. Celebrated for works such as Cloud 9 (1979), Top Girls (1982), Serious Money (1987), Blue Heart (1997), Far Away (2000), and A Number (2002), she has been described as "one of Britain's greatest poets and innovators for the contemporary stage". In a 2011 dramatists' poll by The Village Voice, five out of the 20 polled writers listed Churchill as the greatest living playwright.
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