Far Away ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(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.”

TIME OUT

“Caryl Churchills Far Away is a terrible play, the Yeatsian sense of terrible beauty. It is only 45 minutes long, but it packs the substance of several full-length dramas. It is an apocalyptic play, a play of Armageddon created by its victims. The hats may be a metaphor, as Todd says, but not, as he things, ephemeral. Humanity can prey upon itself like monsters of the deep, but in the meantime it is quite capable of manufacturing gewgaws and fretting about contracts. It is a question of silent consent, of turning a blind eye, of not standing up for any body until, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, there is nobody left to stand up for you.

“The German philosopher Theodor Adorno declared that, after Auschwitz, all literature was garbage: a majestic cop-out, and a flabby self-pitying moral surrender apart from also dismissing, in advance, the works of Miller and Below, Beckett and Pinter, Pasternak and Marquez. Perhaps he meant that man has no metaphor to illuminate the indescribably. I wonder what he would think of this play, its simple moral confidence and its bizarre, terrifying ending, in which nations, plants and animal species are at war with each other: the foxglove is as murderous as bleach, the cats come in on the side of the French, and the mallards are in alliance with elephants and the Koreans.

“Stephen Daldry, returning to the Royal Court to direct, has created a performance of shocking restraint. The actors work with a calm, brutal simplicity. You emerge shaken, but not too numb to think.. Theres nothing like this play around today.”

SUNDAY TIMES

“Here, as in previous plays, Churchill moves into new territory by inventing new speech habits; in this case, a prosaic acceptance of extreme horror coupled with the old language of middle-class values which lingers on like a twinge in a phantom limb. Daldrys cast Katherine Tozer, Kevin McKidd and the phlegmatically sinsiter Linda Bassett grasp the style as a new instrument, and make it sing; not lease in creating comdey from a universal death rattle.”

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

“Its hard to think of a more finger-on-the-theatrical pulse combination thatn the talents involved with Far Away. The post-Billy Elliot Stephen Daldry returns to the stage to direct a political play by Caryl Churchill, who skewered the Thatcher era in Top Girls and Serious Money. Together they supply an exmaple of a genre which the Royal Court has pioneered: tableau theatre, in which installation art is given motion and voice.”

THE OBSERVER