From her early historical, epic Brechtian plays to the more surreal later plays, Churchill has lit a blazing trail. Her career is unmatched in contemporary theatre and she stands with the greats in insisting, with brilliance, on her vision. Alice Saville of Exeunt wrote, "Churchill subtly scrapes away at the selectiveness of the stories we tell to give our world value, to make it feel safe and cosy." [17] Paul Ewing of Londonist asserted that "it's unsettling enough to leave the audience nervously laughing. [...] What may have seemed far away then looks a bit prophetic now." [18] Aleks Sierz of The Arts Desk said in 2020, "I do love this play, but I must admit that – unlike Churchill's very best work – its meaning doesn't deepen very much over the decades. [...] the nature of visions is that they either come literally true, or they remain visionary. And this one remains what it always was: a beautifully imagined fantastical nightmare." [19] Far Away was described as a "great play" on Saturday Review. [20] Reception from playwrights [ edit ] And so Joan goes to sleep. The next scenes take place some years later, and show us an older Joan, now working with a man named Todd in a hat factory. They talk about the hats they make, and their discussion shows them to be devoted artists. As the short scenes progress, the hats grow larger and brighter, until they are described as “enormous and preposterous.”

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..." Leland, Mary (21 June 2017). "Far Away review: Spike Island becomes a dystopia once again". The Irish Times . Retrieved 18 May 2020. Even in its structure, it was so ahead of its time. Caryl captured something about us living in an information age – how we’ve all become more adept at receiving information in small chunks, how the way we process that information affects how we all connect.Not hanging around … Daniel Radcliffe and Alan Cumming in Endgame at the Old Vic. Photograph: Manuel Harlan Far Away” is the second production in Muhlenberg’s mostly-virtual Mnemonic Theatre Festival at Muhlenberg, running through May. Information on all seven productions in the festival can be found at muhlenberg.edu/seesashow 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. Deeply disturbing. Far Away has the picturesque form and gentle rhythms of a fairy tale told at bedtime. But it also finds a grating alarm in traditional sounds of comfort, from the lapping of a stream and the lilt of a lullaby to the hesitating confidences exchanged by a boy and girl falling in love... I can think of no contemporary playwright who combines such scope of imagination and depth of purpose. -Ben Brantley, New York Times Summertime … Nikki Amuka-Bird and Joshua James in Sex from Love and Information at the Royal Court, 2012. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Provocative and disturbing, “Far Away” offers an incisive exploration of fear and tyranny in a dystopian — but uncomfortably familiar — world at war. When the play first premiered at the Royal Court 20 years ago, its war-torn setting could have alluded to the bubbling tensions between the superpowers of the West and the Middle East, which would eventually boil over into the Iraq war three years later. But in 2020, its frictious landscape seems to speak of the refugee crisis, people-smuggling, zero-hours contracts and Brexit-inspired suspicion of foreigners.Sophomore Nicola Ferro plays Joan, the young hat-maker. She says she has enjoyed working through the ambiguities of the script. A Number looks at the emotional effects of developing technology on family relationships and how a threat to our individuality can endanger our sense of what being human is. All three sons have exactly the same DNA but because their life experiences have been different their personalities contrast. It is not explained who licensed multiple versions of the son to be produced, or why this may have been done, so the emphasis in this play is not on autocratic state control but on one-to-one relations. 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. The play has received high praise from many notable playwrights and has been cited as an inspirational work.

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. Thompson, Jessie (13 February 2020). "Far Away review: Caryl Churchill's sinister vision of the future". Evening Standard . Retrieved 19 May 2020. The playwright Alistair McDowall has stated that "It seems, through conversation with my peers, that the two plays with the biggest impact on my generation are Sarah Kane's Blasted and Far Away by Caryl Churchill. Far Away is endlessly talked about. It feels so bespoke and beautifully crafted but the scale is enormous – it's so wrought, so sprawling." [25] Production history [ edit ]After a disturbing childhood episode, the audience next meets Joan hard at work in a hat factory, making elaborate and fanciful hats for some unknown purpose, which grows increasingly ominous as play progresses. Muhlenberg’s costume shop has been hard at work creating a variety of darkly funky headgear, as envisioned by costume designer Maxine Stone, a sophomore at Muhlenberg. Probably inspired by the horrors of the Balkans, ‘Far Away’ isasurreal vision of rapid societal collapse that could very easily be applied to Iraq or to Syria or – in its portrait of hyperpartisanship, if not so much the deaths – rather closer to home. Churchill has also worked with educational institutions such as the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She and school director Mark Wing-Davey took a group of ten graduate students to Bucharest, where they worked with students at the Romanian Institute of Theatre and Cinema on the creation of Mad Forest. Woman as Cultural Concept