Churchill the Dramatist
Though he never wrote a play, he might have been a successful playwright. Winston Churchill admired Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, and Noel Coward—and I am convinced that, had he chosen to direct his talents in that direction, he too could have produced well-made West End dramas. We all know that he played with toy soldiers as a boy, but we should also appreciate that he spent endless hours with a toy theatre. Throughout his adult life, he was a frequent and passionate playgoer, and it was in a theatre that he learned his formidable oratorial and performance skills.
But there was more to it than that. It is said that Oscar Wilde’s most memorable character was Oscar Wilde. In a very similar way, Winston Churchill was a stage character brilliantly crafted by Winston Churchill. Of course all politicians (not just Ronald Reagan) are actors, performing in front of audiences for dramatic effect, but Churchill understood the theatre better than most, and thus made himself into a mesmerizing showman.
The Scaffolding of Rhetoric
Like Wilde (who was a good friend of his mother’s), young Winston wrote dissertations on aesthetics. His 1897 essay “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric” laid out the rules for public speaking that we have come to call “Churchillian.” It was clearly written by a student of the drama, applying to politics the techniques he had observed on stage. Short Anglo-Saxon words have more punch than multisyllabic Greek or Latinate terms (one is tempted to scribble. Strive to evoke “a rapid succession of waves of sound and vivid pictures. The audience is delighted by the changing scenes presented to their imagination.” Here the model was cinematic, when the movies were still a very new medium. Victorian melodrama habitually indulged “a tendency to wild extravagance of language—to extravagance so wild that reason recoils.” But, Churchill advised, such hyperbolic pronouncements “become the watchwords of parties and the creeds of nationalities,” and he would deploy them against not only Hitler, but also Lenin, Gandhi, and (in the 1945 General Election) the Labour Party.
