Far Away (NHB Modern Plays)

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We don’t know what the hats are for until what is probably the most famous scene in the play, one that exists only as stage directions: “A procession of ragged, beaten, chained prisoners, each wearing a hat, on their way to execution.” (A note at the beginning of the plays says of this scene: “The Parade: five is too few and twenty better than ten. A hundred?”) Her early work developed Bertolt Brecht's modernist dramatic and theatrical techniques of 'Epic theatre' to explore issues of gender and sexuality. From A Mouthful of Birds (1986) onwards, she began to experiment with forms of dance-theatre, incorporating techniques developed from the performance tradition initiated by Antonin Artaud with his 'Theatre of Cruelty'. This move away from a clear Fabel dramaturgy towards increasingly fragmented and surrealistic narratives characterises her work as postmodernist. Provocative and disturbing, “Far Away” offers an incisive exploration of fear and tyranny in a dystopian — but uncomfortably familiar — world at war. 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.”

Not hanging around … Daniel Radcliffe and Alan Cumming in Endgame at the Old Vic. Photograph: Manuel Harlan 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.

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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. 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. 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. Scott, Aaron (4 September 2012). "Review: Shaking the Tree's Far Away by Caryl Churchill". Portland Monthly . Retrieved 9 June 2020.

This effect, too, is an important byproduct of Churchill’s elusive style: Her play demands close attention, and thereby exercises our faculty for it. And it is inattention to the world’s harsh and complicated truths — and the indifference of which it’s a symptom — that “Far Away” subtly condemns. 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.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. 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.