Caryl Phillips’s drama: Liminal fiction under construction?

Abstract

Most of the existing criticism on Caryl Phillips deals with his novels or his essays. His plays, which were for the most part written in the 1980s, have received comparatively little attention. This article argues that Phillips’s dramatic production should be examined closely because it contains in a nutshell some of the themes and characters that recur in his more mature work and therefore form the backbone of his world vision. Such a comparative approach helps to highlight Phillips’s artistic consistency and his ability to give different forms to similar concerns. More specifically, its aim is to show to what extent Phillips’s novel In the Falling Snow (2009) is a liminal text that is in fact built upon the preoccupations at the heart of his early plays, most notably Strange Fruit (1981), Where There Is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983).

Keywords:

• Caryl Phillips
• In the Falling Snow
• drama
• liminality

Notes

1. Anita Sethi (2009) writes: “If the novel thrives in those liminal places between here and there; between earth and sky; at train stations, the characters also find themselves at moral crossroads”.

2. See, however, Ledent (2006), which contains some ideas developed in this article; Rahbek (2001); Scafe (2014); Schäffner (1999).

3. I would like to thank Suzanne Scafe for commenting on an earlier version of this article and for suggesting this idea of a difference of tone between Phillips’s plays and In the Falling Snow.

4. It should be added, however, that Vivien makes a gesture towards the younger generation by giving Errol’s girlfriend, Shelley, the key to her house. For Suzanne Scafe this “transforms the house of her disintegrating family into a home for future generations of her children’s children who are both Black and British” (2014, 64).