What If If Only (Caryl Churchill) - Royal Court Theatre

{Spoiler - click to view}
I adored the visceral emotional intensity and honesty of this 1 Act, 16-minute reflection on grief and moving forward. It comes as we stagger through the societal carnage of, what will shortly become, 2-years of living and dying with Covid.

We start with a monologue delivered from the kitchen table as a man nibbles at his meal. He is aghast at the idea of someone spending ten years painting a perfect picture of an apple, and then spending the next seven trying to paint the exact opposite of an apple. Imagines that, he cries.

He is then presented with a vision, not in the biblical sense and distinct from ghost in the popular sense. It’s something like a person, perhaps sharing a vague – very vague – likeness with his partner.

What then emerges is perhaps for individual interpretation. For me, dear reader, it seemed He had spent so long grieving that his deceased partner, in this moment, develops form, some dimension. Is this a - frankly overdue - coping mechanism; after seven years was he conversing with his own subconscious through the powerful memory of his partner ..

There will come an answer, let it be, let it be.

The vision – wearing an apple-coloured dress - presents the idea of Her always being with Him – in his present, in memory – but him also choosing a future, from the thousands he might, with someone else. And if He so chooses, because he is still young, that future might include becoming father to a son.

In the opening monologue, it seems we don’t learn what happens after the ten years of painting and seven years of erasure. But we probably do; the Vision’s arrival is perhaps the start of Act 3 of that monologue.

Perhaps, also, in order to move forward as a society we must first choose to move forward individually, bearing our pain, choosing life.