Stage Directions In Caryl Churchill's 'Vinegar Tom'

The theatre student asserts that plays are meant to be seen, and the English student generally works on the opposite assumption. We spend far too much time doing close readings of Shakespeare and the like throughout the study of English to allow any belief that we are not consuming the works as they were intended. There too seems to exist a strong correlation between esoteric or modern plays and the pithiness of their stage directions. This is to say that, without reading the script, an audience is missing on the syntaxical beauty of well-written stage directions — this part of the writing becomes a secret of the actors, and one they must only convey through movement and expression. Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom is a play with very little in terms of stage directions, but the songs that are so crucial to addressing the main thematic elements almost have the opposite problem of translation of wordless additions to scripts. While the physical manifestations of stage directions are arguably only a reflection, sometimes refraction, of what is actually written, transcribed lyrics to the songs pale in comparison to their actual performance. Part of the ephemerality of theatre parallels that fleeting beauty of

According to Churchill’s production notes, “[the songs] are not part of the action.” She also calls for singers to be dressed contemporarily if possible. Neither of these production notes were blatantly ignored, but the lines of what was intended by them were certainly blurred. The contemporary ensembles of the singers drew them out of the piece enough to command elements of Brechtian theatre and jar the audience with the odd juxtaposition, but the “witchy” aspects of the costumes allowed for the singers to become fixed in the motif- based