Far Away (NHB Modern Plays)

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Churchill’s A Number is a somewhat longer piece (running for about one hour) and with its more naturalistic style is also more accessible than Far Away. Again acting as a warning of where our society may be heading in the future, this time the focus is on how scientific advances — specifically human cloning — can impact on issues of personal identity in a play that examines nature versus nurture. 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.

What is it, though, about Far Away that keeps me reading it, thinking about it, year after year? Like all great tragedies, it contains more than any summary can say. Its meaning is not merely a moral statement; its meaning is the play itself: its imagery and words, its lacunae and aporias. Great theatre gives us more than meaning, it gives us performance, even if we have never seen a production of the play. There are moments from Blasted that were burned into my brain long before I saw it in performance, and I have never had the chance to see a production of Far Away or Grasses of a Thousand Colors, but their apocalypses are vivid in my mind. With just a moment of concentration, I hear Joan’s final monologue in my ears, I see the prisoners in their ridiculous hats marching to their deaths. Keeping those sounds and images in my imagination, I have a sense of their meaning, yes, but much more—the frisson of great art, the richness of metaphors and something beyond metaphors: the wonder, the madness of creation.Scott, Aaron (4 September 2012). "Review: Shaking the Tree's Far Away by Caryl Churchill". Portland Monthly . Retrieved 9 June 2020.

It has the picturesque form and gentle rhythms of a fairy tale,” the Times says. “Each carefully chosen detail seems to vibrate with unsettled depths. And each summons anxieties both primal and mercilessly particular to the times in which we live.” 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]

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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.”) Far Away starts quietly but develops into a twisted fairy tale that haunts our consciousness with the hyper-reality of a nightmare. With the play’s elliptical poetry and surreal humour, the audience has to work hard to make connections between the scenes, which it transpires are set several years apart. We don’t know for sure what is going on but there are intimations of ethnic cleansing and suppression of dissidents in a totalitarian state, with the political strife ultimately descending into ecological catastrophe. In the play’s last scene, Churchill imagines, hilariously, a future in which the rot of human evil has spread to the animal and mineral worlds. The planet and all it contains has been divided into us and them, and when it is thus divided, it doesn’t really matter who is us and who is them: Any creature on the other side is ripe for extinction, and Joan can blithely talk of having “killed two cats and a child under 5.”

Far Away was first produced at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London in November/December 2000. Whatever her politics and philosophy, Churchill brings a fire and an energy, a special eye and ear, to the postmodern English drama. She is an inspiration to the feminist movement and to women intellectuals around the world. She remains a force crying out for the release of the individual of either gender from the oppressive imperatives of past practices and present expectations. To her art, she contributes an inventive mind and a willingness to invest great energies in wedding the play to the performance. She has continuously rejected linear structure and the use of the master narratives of socialist realism to present her themes. She has also rejected the Brechtean epic theater in favor of using “found objects,” such as various couples in a hotel room or snatches of everyday speech, and re-contextualizing these found objects into new situations that emphasize new meanings. In this way she is much like the famous avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp who made a fountain of a toilet bowl. 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.The play opens with a young girl, Joan (Sophia Ally), who, after being sent by her city-dwelling parents to live with her aunt Harper (Jessica Hynes) and uncle in the countryside, discovers a dark secret in the middle of the night. This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. ( June 2010) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Hotel represents yet another structural experimentation for Churchill. It is an opera, with music by Orlando Gough, set in eight identical hotel rooms superimposed together on stage, with actors playing multiple roles. A number of different couples occupy the rooms at one time or another, including a couple having an adulterous affair and another couple who are homosexual. A television set also figures as a major character. By doubling and tripling the actors in various roles, Churchill subtly emphasizes the commonality of human oppression and pain. Saturday Review - Midnight Family, Masculinities exhibition, Actress by Anne Enright, Far Away by Caryl Churchill, I Am Not Okay With This - BBC Sounds". www.bbc.co.uk . Retrieved 24 May 2020.