A Mouthful of Birds

A Mouthful of Birds is a 1986 play with dance by Caryl Churchill. Drawing its themes from The Bacchae of Euripides, it is a meditation on madness, sexuality, and female violence.

The play has an unusual structure; it is a series of short independent scenes each focusing on a different character. In a prologue, each cast member gives an out-of-context snatch of dialogue expressing his character. Each story is then told separately. After each scene, a moment in the tragedy of Pentheus is seen, and throughout the play Dionysos, a dancer, watches the action invisibly. At some point in each scene Dionysos kisses the central character, causing his transformation. At the play's end, the lead characters return to give epilogues narrating how their stories continued.

The episodes include:

• An unhappy wife slowly succumbs to schizophrenia. She experiences command hallucinations telling her to drown her baby in the bathtub and eventually does so.
• A man's marriage and career are disrupted when he falls passionately in love with a pig at a slaughterhouse his company owns. The man and the pig
• A voodoo practitioner newly arrived in London is haunted by an upper-crust British spirit who tries to drive away her familiar Haitian spirit guide, Baron Sunday.
• Herculin Barbin, a nineteenth-century hermaphrodite also written about by Michel Foucault, narrates the story of his transformation from girl to man at puberty. This monologue lies at the center of the play and is performed first by an actress, then repeated in identical language by a male actor.
• A woman struggles to overcome alcoholism.
• Two jailers must restore order in their prison when a serial killer among the inmates inexplicably changes sex and begins killing other prisoners with magic.
• A female office worker is subject to grotesque, bloody fantasies and spasms of rage.

The actors play ensemble roles in all scenes other than their own. Dance sequences are at the center of the episodes involving the pig and his lover, the schizophrenic and her hallucinated tormentor, and the serial killer.

References

• Madness and Signification in A Mouthful of Birds, by Laura Nutten