Churchill @ The Eisemann Center
—Sam Lisman
Last month, the Charles W. Eisenmann Center for Performing Arts in Richardson hosted three performances of Churchill, a one-man play written by and starring British actor David Payne. Payne has made a name for himself touring a similar show based on the life and writings of C.S. Lewis (which I was privileged to see at the Wyly just before the shut-down in 2020), and he used the forced hiatus of the pandemic to fulfill his desire to develop a new project.
I believe this is a more challenging work for him, since Winston Churchill is a much more familiar figure to his audience than Lewis. Yes, most people who would attend a C.S. Lewis play have read the Narnia books or The Screwtape Letters, but most Americans have seen actual video of Churchill. We know his look, his voice, his mannerisms, his peculiarities (Payne keeps an unlit cigar—of appropriate size—in his hand through much of the performance). Lewis could be portrayed as any old, well-educated British man; Churchill has to match our expectations, and for the most part, Payne did. He is not an impressionist or mimic (no Rich Little or Dana Carvey), and his voice isn’t Churchillian—but it rumbles well, and follows the cadences and pronunciations we remember and expect.
He uses as his conceit the occasion of President Kennedy awarding him honorary U.S. citizenship in 1963 (the printed program said 1969, which threw me for a loop, as both men were long dead by then). For health reasons, Churchill had been unable to attend the White House ceremony, so he was here speaking to the Oxford American Society, expressing his thanks for the honor. The focus of his speech was on how he became the man he was, and how that enabled him to handle the events he faced. This rather broad topic allows Payne to sprinkle in many of Churchill’s greatest bon mots and quotable quotes as he reminisces about his life.
Having never finished William Manchester’s magisterial biography of Churchill, The Last Lion (actually, neither did Manchester, who died while working on Volume III, later completed by another author), I can’t critique too much of the history discussed. Payne certainly seemed to get the World War II parts correct, as well as Sir Winston’s powerful love for his wife Clementine. He also speaks long and well of FDR, or Franklin, as Churchill calls him. It’s true they had a very close and friendly relationship—and in fact were distant cousins, although this isn’t mentioned in the play.
The performance was quite enjoyable, but I must note that a few things seemed discordant to me. First, Churchill had a profound attachment to Shakespeare, but this was never mentioned by Payne. While this may seem superficial, please remember that a number of actors (Richard Burton among them) had complained over the years that while performing Hamlet, someone in the audience was audibly reciting their lines with them. Invariably, it was Churchill. And it’s worth noting that such behavior, even from the Prime Minister, deserves immediate ejection from the theater. It seems unlikely that in a speech spending so much time on his upbringing and education, Churchill would fail to mention the Bard. Few people go through life knowing all of Hamlet’s dialogue by heart.
Second, at one point Payne’s Churchill qualifies the word unique. Churchill, an expert in the English language if ever anyone was, would have known full well that uniqueness, like pregnancy, can’t be partial. Something either is or isn’t unique. It cannot be somewhat unique, partially unique, mostly unique, a little unique.
Finally, and much less pedantically, the speech didn’t mention the threat from the Soviet Union or world-wide communism. The play leaves out the Cold War entirely, a subject Churchill would not have omitted. It was he, after all, who gave us the term “The Iron Curtain” (which, he famously said, had fallen across Europe), and he was a true Cold Warrior (even advocating at times for a hotter war) unto death. He correctly saw the Soviet threat as equal—or superior, once they stole the atomic bomb—to the Nazi threat he had helped to vanquish.
While he hit many of Churchill’s most loved one-liners, I do wish Payne had included my favorite Churchill put down: Churchill was heeding the call of nature, shall we say, when he was told that someone he disliked needed to speak with him. Making sure that the person in question could hear him, he bellowed out: “Tell him to wait; I can only deal with one shit at a time.” The audience’s laughter would have surely brought down the Eisenmann’s roof.
WEB: For future events, see the Eisemann’s calendar at eisemanncenter.com
