Far Away (NHB Modern Plays)

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This last image reveals Churchill's preoccupation with Foucault's concept of "docile bodies", bodies disciplined by institutions such as the family or factory into becoming obedient wives/workers, one such being Val, an oppressed rural worker. Val's sudden reappearance is a theatrical coup that left theatre-goers gasping. But she is also pointing to the possibilities of opening up a new "unreal" theatrical space that might encompass a woman's desire not controlled by the male gaze, patriarchy or capitalism.

The final scene brings Harper, Joan, and Todd together at the end of the world. A war has begun, but not an ordinary war: a war of, quite literally, everything against everything. Joan and Todd are now married, and Joan has run to Harper’s house to see Todd and get away from the war for a day. It’s clear, though, that there really is no escape, no rest. It’s hard for them to tell what is with us and what’s against us, and what “us” means anymore. (Harper asks Todd if he’d feed a hungry deer if it came into the yard. “Of course not,” Todd says. “I don’t understand that,” Harper says, “because the deer are with us. They have been for three weeks.”) Caryl Churchill (born 3 September 1938, London) has become well known for her willingness to experiment with dramatic structure. Her innovations in this regard are sometimes so startling and compelling that reviewers tend to focus on the novelty of her works to the exclusion of her ideas. Churchill, however, is a playwright of ideas, ideas that are often difficult and, despite her bold theatricality, surprisingly subtle and elusive. Her principal concern is with the issues attendant on the individual’s struggle to emerge from the ensnarements of culture, class, economic systems, and the imperatives of the past. Each of these impediments to the development and happiness of the individual is explored in her works. Not surprisingly for a contemporary female writer, many times she makes use of female characters to explore such themes. This mysterious, powerful play is like a disquisition on two of the most powerful poles in our lives: needing to know and needing to love. It is also the work of a great artist, a late work, so in some way it is a reflection on all that has preceded it. In "Climate", a voice states: "I'm frightened for the children," and later: "It's whether they drown or starve or get killed in the fight for water." Here is a writer who can convey with simplicity and directness such a terrible fear. Is this the information you want? Here it is. Can you live with it?You’re part of a big movement now to make things better. You can be proud of that. You can look at the stars and think here we are in our little bit of space, and I’m on the side of the people who are putting things right, and your soul will expand right into the sky. Harper (Frances McDormand) gently tries to send her along with the usual motherly ministrations —“Are you cold?,”“Do you want a drink?”— but it is gradually revealed that little Joan has been disturbed not by any such simple needs, but by having witnessed strange horrors her young mind can scarcely comprehend. A production of Far Away ran at New York Theatre Workshop in New York City from 11 November 2002 to 18 January 2003. The production was nominated for the 2003 Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Costume Design and Outstanding Sound Design. [27] Leland, Mary (21 June 2017). "Far Away review: Spike Island becomes a dystopia once again". The Irish Times . Retrieved 18 May 2020.

Mark Ravenhill has said that seeing the play was "one of my most revelatory moments at the Royal Court" and that "[watching the play] you feel your brain re-wiring itself on your sense of how language works, and who we are in that moment sort of neurologically shifting." [23] It is just such creation that stands against the destruction of the world, and offers what little hope we as a species deserve.The script is dark and unpredictable,” says Muhlenberg senior Marlee Schulman, who directs the play. “It feels right for the time that we’re in. We've had to read between the lines and we have our own interpretations. I think the audience will as well.” It was tiring there because everything’s been recruited, there were piles of bodies and if you stopped to find out there was one killed by coffee or one killed by pins, they were killed by heroin, petrol, chainsaws, hairspray, bleach, foxgloves, the smell of smoke was where we were burning the grass that wouldn’t serve. The Bolivians are working with gravity, that’s a secret so as not to spread alarm. But we’re getting further with noise and there’s thousands dead of light in Madagascar. Who’s going to mobilise darkness and silence? Typical of Churchill, the story is not linear, but rather occurs in fragments. The dialogue is also presented in fragments. As Churchill points out in the introduction to the play, she has constructed the work in the way we perceive opera in performance, especially classic opera in languages other than English. We hear snatches of dialogue, but the requirements of the music often overshadow the entire line. The use of fragmented dialogue and non-linear story development is also found in plays such as This Is a Chair, where a series of domestic scenes is compared to events about the world through the use of placards naming each scene. Churchill’s use of fragments of dialogue suggests that language can often fail as a means of communication, especially when those using language take little care in its employment. This suggestion is further emphasized in that the fragments are always realistic bits of everyday conversation used in a surrealistic manner. She saw her uncle herding frightened, wounded people into the shed in the yard, beating a couple of them savagely. The unsettled Harper gradually reshapes Joan’s impressions around a benign hypothesis: Her uncle was trying to help those people, she says — only there were a few bad, traitorous ones who had to be punished. Scott, Aaron (4 September 2012). "Review: Shaking the Tree's Far Away by Caryl Churchill". Portland Monthly . Retrieved 9 June 2020.

It’s better not to describe all the specifics of Churchill’s fable — it should be allowed to sneak up on you — but eventually we realize, with a shudder, the ramifications of the first scene, how it contains the seed of all that follows. An indifference to human suffering has been smoothly, smilingly inculcated in a child, and the play goes on to illustrate the monstrous fruit of the process. Most people don’t often think of playwrights as science fiction and fantasy writers, and SF doesn’t really exist as a genre in the theatre world in the same way it does in the world of print and cinema. Yet from its earliest incarnations, theatre has reveled in the fantastic, and many of the greatest plays of all time have eschewed pure realism. Something about the relationship between performers and audiences lends itself to fantasy. Provocative and disturbing, “Far Away” offers an incisive exploration of fear and tyranny in a dystopian — but uncomfortably familiar — world at war. Churchill’s 2002 play A Number involved cloning, which is about as close to core science fiction as she has gotten, but her work from the late 1970s till now has seldom relied on kitchen-sink realism. Cloud Nine required actors to play different genders and races, Top Girls included a meeting between various women from fiction and history, Mad Forest included among its cast a talking dog and a vampire, the title character of The Skriker is “a shape-shifter and death portent, ancient and damaged,” and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You is a two character play where the characters are a man named Guy and a country named Sam. The main theme of "Far Away" is fear: more specifically, the fear imposed by a government upon its citizens. This fear permeates the work from the smuggling of people by Joan's uncle to the public march of death for prisoners of the government.Salter then has a disturbing confrontation with his estranged original son (B1) who, seething with resentment both for his abusive childhood and for being “replaced”, threatens to kill B2. Later, Salter also goes on to meet for the first time another identical son, called Michael, who turns out to be a maths teacher, happily married with three children, and not at all upset at learning he is a copy — but there seems to be no personal connection between them. Of course it's possible to trace recurring themes in Churchill's work - alienation between parent and child, the possibility and failure of revolution. But it is the variety of her work that is most striking. As Von Mayenburg says: "With each play, she discovers new genres and forms. She then discards them and moves on, opening up possibilities for other playwrights to explore. I think many people writing today don't even realise they've been influenced by her. She's changed the language of theatre. And very few playwrights do that." In four of her best-known works– Cloud Nine, Top Girls, A Mouthful of Birds, and Vinegar Tom—Churchill presents woman as a cultural concept and displays the power of that concept to submerge and smother the individual female. In Cloud Nine, a parallel is suggested between Western colonial oppression and Western sexual oppression. This oppression is seen first in the family organization and then in the power of the past to demand obligations from the present. Although her characters use geographical distance and literally run away from the past, no one in Cloud Nine can exorcise the ghosts of established practices and traditions. Marlowe, Sam (13 February 2020). "Far Away review — this Hell is terrifyingly close to home". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 18 May 2020.