By Caryl Churchill
SECOND YEAR STUDENT PERFORMANCE PROJECT
Bachelor of Creative Industries – Acting and Performance
Fen is ‘a reminder that British theatre has produced no more a courageous writer or one who mines our dark, damaged psyches with such forensic thoughtfulness as Churchill.’
Lyn Gardner, The Guardian.
Director’s notes
Fen tells the story of female farm workers and their struggles in the Fenlands of East Anglia: a vast plain of reclaimed farmland full of canals and haunted by the ghosts of the past. It is a dark and at times funny portrayal of lives lived on the edge of poverty, and of the economic and spiritual struggles of ordinary working women and men living in the early 1980’s, a time of great political and social change.
Fen was first performed by the Joint Stock Theatre Group at the University of Essex Theatre on 20 January 1983 and opened at the Almeida Theatre, London on 16th February 1983. It was inspired in part by interviews with locals and the book Fenwomen by Mary Chamberlain.
Caryl Churchill (born 1938) is the author of modern masterpieces like Cloud 9, Top Girls, Serious Money, Love and Information and many other plays. She is one of the world’s most important and celebrated playwrights and is still experimenting and pushing the boundaries of dramatic writing.
By Arrangement with ORiGiN™ Theatrical On Behalf of Samuel French A Concord Theatricals Company
This event is an initiative of the students from TAFE Queensland Brisbane region as part of their assessment.
‘It was work, work, work, it was all their lives.’
Retired School Teacher
‘What’s the point of working till you drop?’
Union Branch Secretary
‘I’m the only Marxist in the Fens.’
Smallholder
‘They must think I’m off the road.’
Smallholder
‘If you don’t believe, you don’t see anything.’
Retired Landworker
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer, to give up customs one barely had time to learn, not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future; no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave even one’s own first name behind, forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy. Strange to no longer desire one’s desires. Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity. Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created. Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead. The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it, through both realms forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.