Far Away

It is no use to see and listen to Far Away, trying to make ‘sense’ of it by twisting it into something ‘real’ or naturalistic.  That’s not Caryl Churchill’s way and never has been.  The text, spoken by the actors as if for them what they say is perfectly natural and ‘real’, is allusive, suggestive, metaphorical and, most of all, disturbing.  It may be disturbing much later too, after we have left the theatre, as the words and what happens on stage continue to resonate.

Here, in a remote house, possibly a ‘safe place, a refuge, a child, Young Joan (Darcy Sterling-Cox) is disturbed by something she sees in the night.  An older woman, Harper (Alison Whyte) attempts to comfort her and send her back to sleep.  But it is too late: the child has witnessed something horrific and Harper’s attempts to explain are evasive, euphemistic and maybe outright lies.  We don’t know the truth and the scene has no resolution. 

Young Joan grows up; now she is just Joan (Lucy Ansell) beginning work as a milliner in a hat factory alongside old hand Todd (Darcy Kent). 

Todd is circumspect – with good reason.  The place is sinister or worse, and the management corrupt.  Here, as well, Churchill opens up the concepts of disposable people and what satisfaction there may be in making things that are only to be destroyed.  As Joan learns more – and Harper returns – she is fearful – no terrified – of the world in which everything is on one side or the other – every animal, every insect, even inanimate objects and forces. 

The play pushes into the absurd, or the absurdist, but at the same time it is not at all bizarre or weird since Churchill has brought us to this point where this binary conflict (good vs. bad; them vs. us) that has taken over the whole world, induces a kind of vertiginous terror in the characters – and supposedly the audience.

All very well, but director Cassandra Fumi and designer Dann Barber (who have both done such wonderful work before this) seem to be in the grip of their concept for this work – a concept that, rather than illuminating the work, overlays it and creates puzzling (at least to me) barriers.  While we are puzzling, we may likely be inhibited from what Churchill, in her unique style, has to tell us. 

There is a staircase, which Young Joan descends.  Subsequently the actors partly disassemble it.  Under it there is a cupboard from which Young Joan emerges later.  Why?  Most curious and indeed distracting is that the entire playing space is surrounded and crowded throughout by columns of black hotboxes, each with a maker’s marque. 

For a metaphoric work, might it not be advisable to let the metaphors emerge clean rather than ‘helping’ them with interpretive excesses?  In the midst of this, the cast does their work impeccably, particularly Lucy Ansell in taking her Joan from optimistic naïf to frozen paranoid.     

Far Away is considered by some to be Churchill’s best play, a masterwork and even among the best forty plays ever written. On this showing, I wouldn’t go so far, but then it is necessary in this case to separate (if one can) text and playwright’s intentions from what is happening on the Fortyfivedownstairs space.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Cameron Grant