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Now aged 88, Britain’s greatest living playwright Caryl Churchill remains our most enigmatic: her plays are dazzlingly other, dizzyingly surreal feats of linguistics and politics, and she has almost never given an interview.
You might have reasonably concluded she’d retired: there hasn’t been a new play since 2021’s What If If Only. Churchill has certainly earned the right to retire, but that never really seemed to be her vibe, and given her habit of completely bypassing the usual commissioning system by spontaneously dropping off finished works with trusted associates, you’d never write her off.
And now she’s back. Triumph is a 15-minute play that will run for 10 performances only next month.
If a 15-minute play sounds like a silly thing to get excited about then one, you’re wrong. Two, a Caryl Churchill play typically has the linguistic density of a supernova and doesn’t need to be very long. And three, if you absolutely need more persuading Triumph features a superlative cast of Matthew Beard and, most notably, Kate O’Flynn, the Brit stage star who has gone on to bigger things on TV via her Emmy-winning turn in Widow’s Bay.
What’s the play about? The only description we have is the following:
‘Excellent work, the emperor’s happy.
That makes me happy.
But Press Secretary Iris is falling for a reporter. Will everyone stay happy?’
Presumably it’s a fairly political number but who really needs to know the details: it’s Caryl frickin’ Churchill. Directed by her regular collaborator James Macdonald it’s also very reasonably priced: yes, it’s short, but tickets are £5-£10, which is well worth it (while they last).
Triumph is at the Almeida Theatre, Oct 16-23. Tickets are on sale now.
Churchill’s Cloud 9 features in our top London theatre shows to see this autumn.