Far Away (NHB Modern Plays)

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THE THEATREVOICE DEBATE: NEW WRITING Audio recording and Transcript. Hosted by Aleks Sierz featuring Richard Bean, Simon Stephens and Mark Ravenhill. Far Away opens on a girl questioning her aunt about having seen her uncle hitting people with an iron bar. Several years later, the whole world is at war - including birds and animals. The girl has returned to her aunt to take refuge and begins to describe her journey: 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..." Thompson, Jessie (13 February 2020). "Far Away review: Caryl Churchill's sinister vision of the future". Evening Standard . Retrieved 19 May 2020. 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.

Scene 4: Joan and Todd compliment each other on their almost completed hats. Todd announces he is going to talk to "him" (someone working above Todd). He says he is going to talk about the brother-in-law and hint at the possibility of leaking information to a friend of his who is a journalist. He say that if he lost his job, he'd miss Joan. Sophomore Nicola Ferro plays Joan, the young hat-maker. She says she has enjoyed working through the ambiguities of the script. A German production, entitled In weiter Ferne, opened in April 2001 at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin, directed by Falk Richter. [26]

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Politics are incredibly important to Caryl," says Wright, who will direct a reading of Top Girls. "I think she's had so much of her work premiered at the Royal Court because she sees it as an anti-establishment place. That makes it very different from other theatres for her." For Marius von Mayenburg, resident playwright at Berlin's Schaubühne theatre, it is Churchill's ability to capture the "reality of political emotion" that makes her such a distinct voice. "Many German playwrights of the same generation became didactic in their writing," says Von Mayenburg, "but she has taken political theatre to a new level. Her plays ask the important questions. We produced A Number in Berlin, and it captured the audience's anxiety about the dissolution of identity." 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.

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] Phillips, Michael (19 February 2004). " 'Far Away's' 3 acts nearly a masterpiece". Chicago Tribune . Retrieved 9 June 2020. The British playwright Caryl Churchill has written a great number of extraordinary plays, many of them enlivened by impossible events. Churchill is a staunchly political writer, a writer who seeks to challenge audiences’ complacencies about the real life of the real world, but flights of imagination give resonance to her unblinking view of reality’s horrors, using the unreal to probe the deep grammar of reality.

However, it also requires restraint, directness and urgency, and Godwin gives us all three. His cast, too, match to the clarity of Churchill's moral vision, with performances that are straight and true, entirely without fuss or artifice. By the end, the birdsong has been replaced by the murderous cry of crows. Not sweet and cosy at all, but like a death rattle. In the first scene a young girl, Joan (a role shared by Sophia Ally and Abbiegail Mills) is staying with Hynes’s Harper, who would appear to be her aunt, for reasons that are unclear– a holiday? An evacuation? In a morbidly comic dialogue, she tells Harper about the brutal treatment of a group of prisoners she witnessed at the hands of her uncle; Harper keeps trying to come up with innocuous explanations, which are drolly undercut in turn by Joan as she relates some new detail she saw. Perhaps Churchill is remarkable for her good fortune with directors, too: Stephen Daldry, who helmed the London premiere of this play two seasons ago, has re-created his production at New York Theater Workshop, and it’s a marvel. The play’s power is indelibly linked to its economy and the elusiveness of its import — its scenes are like little pieces of a puzzle you fondle with distracted fascination until suddenly, terribly, they fit together — but also to the sharpness and precision of Daldry’s stage pictures, which shimmer like reflections in dark water. 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. 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.”

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. 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] 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."Scene 2: Joan and Todd learn more about each other through a discussion about their current hat designs. Todd brings up a hypothesis that the way the company gets contracts is corrupt, claiming there is a certain person's brother-in-law that is involved. Joan wants to know more, but Todd doesn't want to talk about it at work. Joan changes the topic, saying she does not like to watch the trials at night. Todd says he watches them every night while drinking Pernod, or absinthe. 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?