Ding Dong the Wicked
Description
A short play by one of the UK's leading dramatists.
A child is shut in her room, a dog is dead in the road, someone is kissing her brother-in-law. A family locked in hatred is sending a son to war. And meanwhile in another country…
Caryl Churchill's play Ding Dong the Wicked was first performed at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, London, in October 2012. It was presented alongside Churchill's full-length play, Love and Information, which was then being premiered at the Royal Court.
Reviews
"A nationalist epic in shorthand... the play kicks in and detonates slowly inside your skull as you leave the building."
- Whatsonstage.com
"As always Churchill seems inventive, coolly socialist, bleak yet dazzling, a bit of a shaman."
- Evening Standard
"As ever, Churchill's mastery of language is key... Ding Dong borders on the harrowing...but it also has a streak of black humour a mile wide."
- Time Out
"An intriguing work, with an underlying atmosphere of unease and menace reminiscent of Pinter... it nags away in the memory long after you have left the theatre."
- The Telegraph
"The best short play since Harold Pinter's Mountain Language."
- Mark Lawson, Front Row
"Churchill implies that all societies today seethe with a paranoia that turns every knock at the door into a threat, and that we all-too-easily translate our private range into public violence. She also comes up with some graphically concrete images: a dog dead in the road, a child locked in a room, anger at 'ugly little houses right in the middle of the view.'"
- The Guardian