Caryl Churchill’s play, Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza ,is a short, six-page response that revolves around the Israeli military strike on Gaza in 2008 and 2009. The play features no clear characters and is constructed primarily of seven spoken blocks of texts that can be performed in a plethora of ways. Each of the seven parts address or focus on a female Jewish child, spoken by a person or people protective and caring of the child. Although the play and its playwright have been labeled anti-semitic for the controversial topic and the seemingly one-sided viewpoint sympathizing with Gaza, the play’s lasting appeal lies with its emotional, instinctive, and immutable overall ramifications. Churchill’s script alone, as well as recorded …show more content…
Although the play fits into six pages and ten minutes, the amount of relation between the text and the audience lasted beyond the conclusion. The progression from caring for the child’s innocence with the mentality of overall instinctual protection to the exasperation of the harsh, true feelings by the denouement allows the audience to identify with the speaker while simultaneously making each viewer uncomfortable, experiencing the full extent of a human being’s instinct to love and protect that is painful, and almost barbaric, but honest. Each performance highlighted the main themes of Churchill’s play, but at each peroration a different work was created. The Guardian’s production accentuated the emotional, close up aspects of each soliloquy and the timelessness of the text. The Warwick Student Drama production also emphasized the caring and protective emotion in the text, but this time with added atmosphere, conversation, and a busier, more realistic overview. The ROOM Productions performance was immersive but shared the thematic traits of the others, focusing on communication, unending cycles of children facing violence. and the audience’s individual experience. All in all, beyond the political connections and reactions, Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza revolves around the instinctual and honest emotions of humanity, especially regarding children in wartime. Each performance pinpointed this theme, but the diverse use of theatrical elements differentiated each, just like all theater productions. Therefore, Churchill’s play, though short and multifaceted, was subject to various interpretations and, in turn,
...it may help us arrive at an understanding of the war situation through the eyes of what were those of an innocent child. It is almost unique in the sense that this was perhaps the first time that a child soldier has been able to directly give literary voice to one of the most distressing phenomena of the late 20th century: the rise of the child-killer. While the book does give a glimpse of the war situation, the story should be taken with a grain of salt.
It is imperative to understand the significance of the profound effects these elements have on the audience’s response to the play. Without effective and accurate embodiments of the central themes, seeing a play becomes an aimless experience and the meaning of the message is lost. Forgiveness and redemption stand as the central themes of the message in The Spitfire Grill. Actors communicate character development through both nonverbal and verbal cues; their costumes serve as a visual representation of this development by reflecting the personal transformation of each character. In the case of The Spitfire Grill, set design is cut back to allow for the audience’s primary focus to be on the actors and their story. Different from set design, the use of sound and lights in The Spitfire Grill, establishes the mood for the play. In other words, every theatrical element in a play has a purpose; when befittingly manipulated, these elements become the director’s strongest means of expressing central themes, and therefore a means of achieving set objectives. Here again, The Spitfire Grill is no exception. With the support of these theatrical elements, the play’s themes of forgiveness and redemption shine as bright as the moon on
Throughout Rajiv Joseph’s play, Gruesome Playground Injuries, the two characters, Doug and Kayleen, sporadically meet throughout the course of 30 years due to injuries ranging from getting “beaten up pretty badly” (Joseph 31) to going into a “coma” (Joseph 27). The play starts out with the two characters first meeting in the school nurse’s office with injuries of their own. This is the start of a relationship that is full of pain and healing throughout the years. Told in a very unique structure of five year increments, the play shows how injuries, a reoccurring image that may be self-inflicted or inflicted upon one, bring the pair together when either is in a dire situation.
Vogel’s writing exudes symbolism from the first word of the script to the last – from the rise of the curtain to its close. The glimpses into Li’l Bit’s past are sometimes explicitly and literally described, but Vogel also often uses extended metaphors to act as a detailed commentary on the action. Why, however, did the playwright choose symbolism to convey the effects of sexual abuse – as heavy as its subject matter may be – during the late twentieth century when seemingly nothing is censored in America? In order to answer this and better understand the way in which Vogel uses symbolism –in the smaller elements of the play and extended metaphors – the terms must first be defined.
Firstly let us consider conflict. In each act of the play, we see the overpowering desire to belong leading to a climax of conflict amongst the characters, which has the consequence of exclusion. Conflict is a successful literary technique, as it engages the audience and focuses our attention on the issue of conflict and exclusion, brought about by the characters’ desires to be accepted by their community.
The holocaust is known for the great number of deaths; including the six million Jews. Ida fink is a writer that captures this time period in her works. In “The Key Game” she appeals to pathos because of imagery used, connections to your own family, and dialog used by both the father and mother. Through her fiction stories, she tells tales that relate to what could have been and probably what was. Ida Fink is known for telling her stories in a journalist like tone with very little color. In her stories, she does not like to tell you how to feel she instead leaves that up to the reader. Fink does place some hints of emotion just by writing the story alone. The interpretation of her works is left up to the reader. As you read through her stories some will find more emotion, some will find more logic, and some may see more ethics. At the moment, we will be looking more on the side of emotions within this story.
As we know, the pretext of the play is the aftermath of a war, so I
“Theatre is like a gym for the empathy. It’s where we can go to build up the muscles of compassion, to practice listening and understanding and engaging with people that are not just like ourselves. We practice sitting down, paying attention and learning from other people’s actions. We practice caring.” (Bill English of the SF Playhouse). This quote accurately summarises the purpose of Children’s Theatre, to help the growth and understanding of children whilst also keeping them entertained through theatrical techniques. The National Theatre’s Cat in the Hat, along with our performance pieces of Cranky Bear and Possum Magic all showcased these techniques in a number of ways, whilst also subconsciously coinciding with the child development theories
This marked the beginning of the Palestine armed conflict, one of its kinds to be witnessed in centuries since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and World War 1. Characterized by a chronology of endless confrontations, this conflict has since affected not only the Middle East relations, but also the gl...
But, as Sandy Tolan 's book, The Lemon Tree, seeks to explain, through Dalia’s longing for zion and Bashir’s belief in the arab right of return, that the main catalyst of the Arab-Israeli conflict is
Paldiel, Mordecai. "Holocaust Essays and Poems." The Holocaust, Crimes, Heroes and Villains. Louis Bülow. Web. 07 Dec. 2011. .
Edward Said “States” refutes the view Western journalists, writers, and scholars have created in order to represent Eastern cultures as mysterious, dangerous, unchanging, and inferior. According to Said, who was born in Jerusalem at that time Palestine, the way westerners represent eastern people impacts the way they interact with the global community. All of this adds to, Palestinians having to endure unfair challenges such as eviction, misrepresentation, and marginalization that have forced them to spread allover the world. By narrating the story of his country Palestine, and his fellow countrymen from their own perspective Said is able to humanize Palestinians to the reader. “States” makes the reader feel the importance of having a homeland, and how detrimental having a place to call home is when trying to maintain one’s culture. Which highlights the major trait of the Palestinian culture: survival. Throughout “States”, Said presents the self-preservation struggles Palestinians are doomed to face due to eviction, and marginalization. “Just as we once were taken from one habitat to a new one we can be moved again” (Said 543).
“‘If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.’” ― Anne Frank (“Children During the Holocaust” 5). In Lodz, Poland, the Nazis had reduced a Jewish population of more than 220,000 to almost less than 1,000 (“Hidden Children: Quest for Family” 2). Families during the Holocaust were treated so badly that being Jewish for some Jewish children had come to symbolize persecution while Christianity symbolized security (“Hidden Children: Quest For Family” 3). And, another frequent problem of the separation of the family was a child's inability in later life to form effective bonds (“Separation from the Family” 12). The Holocaust was something people could only imagine. Families were split apart, loved ones were
Even though Zionist and non-Zionist hearts bleed together at cruelty and mistreatment of Jews, there are many differences such as, the portrayal of Jews. “The basic proposition is that three-fourths of the Jews of the world are living in hopeless misery. Of the ten millions, one-half live in the pale of Settlement in Russia under conditions which have been depicted repeatedly to the horror of civilized mankind. One million are in Galicia, ni...
In 1979, Caryl Churchill wrote a feminist play entitled Cloud Nine. It was the result of a workshop for the Joint Stock Theatre Group and was intended to be about sexual politics. Within the writing she included a myriad of different themes ranging from homosexuality and homophobia to female objectification and oppression. “Churchill clearly intended to raise questions of gender, sexual orientation, and race as ideological issues; she accomplished this largely by cross-dressing and role-doubling the actors, thereby alienating them from the characters they play.” (Worthen, 807) The play takes part in two acts; in the first we see Clive, his family, friends, and servants in a Victorian British Colony in Africa; the second act takes place in 1979 London, but only twenty-five years have passed for the family. The choice to contrast the Victorian and Modern era becomes vitally important when analyzing this text from a materialist feminist view; materialist feminism relies heavily on history. Cloud Nine is a materialist feminist play; within it one can find examples that support all the tenets of materialist feminism as outlined in the Feminism handout (Bryant-Bertail, 1).