Far Away ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper review

(L to R) : Linda Bassett, Anabelle Seymour-Julen, Katherine Tozer, Kevin McKidd

Production photography by Ivan Kyncl.

Direction: Stephen Daldry. Design: Ian MacNeil. Lighting: Rick Fisher. Sound: Paul Arditti.

Cast : Linda Bassett, Kevin McKidd, Anabelle Seymour-Julen, Katherine Tozer

“ The painted drop sugget an idyllic retreat; a whitewashed cottage nestling in the hills. Playwright Caryl Churchill, however, has something spookier in mind. In its three brief scenes, Far Away recalls Pinters Party Time, as well as Orwells 1984 and Animal Farm. Churchill has never written anything more chilling than the first scene in which a poised young girl, Joan, comes down from her bedroom dragging her soft toy behind her. Linda Bassett as her aunt sits sewing by the light of a single lap. Like some juvenile Jeremy Paxman, the girl starts to ask questions about what she has seen. The aunt tries, unsuccessfully, to fob her off. Remorselessly, our perception of the cottage changes from cosy hideaway to hostile outpost where lorry loads of people arrive secretly to an uncertain fate.

“Next, an older Joan is making hats. A sedate, unthreatening profession surely? But it slowly emerges that she and Todd, her workmate, are expending their talent on creations to be worn in a terrible fashion. They moan about their working conditions but have little interest in the wider barbarities in which they are themselves involved and which, by the final scene have led to a complete breakdown of both the environment and society with some very strange alliances being formed.

“This final nightmarish vision of a world in which the cats have come in on the side of the French is s o bizarre that to some extent I ruptures the Hitchcock-like tension that precedes it. But before that, Churchill and director Stephen Daldry create a dystopia that will be hard to forget. Information drops out in a tortuous fashion. Daldry switches form the epic to the intimate with astonishing ease and extracts a profoundly troubling performance from Bassett as the judgemental aunt, seething with hatred and fear.”

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