276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Far Away (NHB Modern Plays)

£4.995£9.99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Her intimate Donmar production boasts a bit of celebrity casting (Jessica Hynes, playing it fairly straight as seemingly benign but possibly malign matriarch figure Harper), world-class lighting from Peter Mumford, and a nifty electronic score from Christopher Shutt. But otherwise –and with the exception of that single spectacular scene, which gets the Hollywood treatment it deserves, even if it is only about a minute long – it’s not so very different from the version I saw staged on a budget of about 50p at the Young Vic in 2014. It’s not a play for a director to indulge their ego with. It’s a play to witness Churchill at hurricane force, savage, hilarious,totally unlike anyone else. To celebrate her 70th birthday this month, the Royal Court is inviting a number of playwrights, myself included, to direct readings of Churchill's work. Over two weeks, a chronological selection will be presented, from Owners - with its tang of Joe Orton and its prescient portrait of an obsession with ownership - right through to her plays of the past decade, including the disintegrating anti-plays that make up the double bill Blue Heart, and the disturbing fable of a world at war with itself, Far Away.

This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. ( June 2010) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) 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. Saville, Alice (29 February 2020). "The costly stage magic of Caryl Churchill". Exeunt Magazine . Retrieved 18 May 2020.Politics are incredibly important to Caryl," says Wright, who will direct a reading of Top Girls. "I think she's had so much of her work premiered at the Royal Court because she sees it as an anti-establishment place. That makes it very different from other theatres for her." For Marius von Mayenburg, resident playwright at Berlin's Schaubühne theatre, it is Churchill's ability to capture the "reality of political emotion" that makes her such a distinct voice. "Many German playwrights of the same generation became didactic in their writing," says Von Mayenburg, "but she has taken political theatre to a new level. Her plays ask the important questions. We produced A Number in Berlin, and it captured the audience's anxiety about the dissolution of identity." This last image reveals Churchill's preoccupation with Foucault's concept of "docile bodies", bodies disciplined by institutions such as the family or factory into becoming obedient wives/workers, one such being Val, an oppressed rural worker. Val's sudden reappearance is a theatrical coup that left theatre-goers gasping. But she is also pointing to the possibilities of opening up a new "unreal" theatrical space that might encompass a woman's desire not controlled by the male gaze, patriarchy or capitalism. 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. 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.

This production is very much a piece of theatre, in the way that we have approached the script and the structure of the play,” she says. “But there are filmic elements to it too, which virtual production has made possible. The digital stage has allowed us to get closer to the thought processes of the characters, which are crucial to this story.” 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.

Gillinson, Miriam (13 February 2020). "Far Away review – Jessica Hynes brings humour to short, sharp horror". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 19 May 2020. Leland, Mary (21 June 2017). "Far Away review: Spike Island becomes a dystopia once again". The Irish Times . Retrieved 18 May 2020.

Far Away” runs Sunday, March 28, at 1 p.m., and Monday and Tuesday, March 29-30, at 7 p.m. Patrons can register to see the show at muhlenberg.edu/seeashow. What is it, though, about Far Away that keeps me reading it, thinking about it, year after year? Like all great tragedies, it contains more than any summary can say. Its meaning is not merely a moral statement; its meaning is the play itself: its imagery and words, its lacunae and aporias. Great theatre gives us more than meaning, it gives us performance, even if we have never seen a production of the play. There are moments from Blasted that were burned into my brain long before I saw it in performance, and I have never had the chance to see a production of Far Away or Grasses of a Thousand Colors, but their apocalypses are vivid in my mind. With just a moment of concentration, I hear Joan’s final monologue in my ears, I see the prisoners in their ridiculous hats marching to their deaths. Keeping those sounds and images in my imagination, I have a sense of their meaning, yes, but much more—the frisson of great art, the richness of metaphors and something beyond metaphors: the wonder, the madness of creation. Taylor, Paul (24 November 2006). "Drunk Enough To Say I Love You?, Royal Court Theatre, London". The Independent . Retrieved 27 May 2020. 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.

Scene 5 shows the completed hats of Todd and Joan on the heads of prisoners being marched to have the hats "judged" in the trials. Her latest work Love and Information has no named characters, rather a series of unnamed voices in a collection of encounters circling around the central preoccupation. It is up to us as the audience to draw our conclusions as to the meaning of the possible connections and disconnections between the scenarios. A masterpiece from one of the most valuable playwrights working today. Churchill is that rare dramatist who imagines different forms and even invented languages every time out. - Chicago Tribune 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.

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. a b David, Benedict (29 August 2018). "Caryl Churchill at 80 – celebrating UK theatre's 'ultimate playwright' ". The Stage . Retrieved 9 August 2021. 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 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. 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.

Latest Posts

Caryl Churchill (born 3 September 1938, London) has become well known for her willingness to experiment with dramatic structure. Her innovations in this regard are sometimes so startling and compelling that reviewers tend to focus on the novelty of her works to the exclusion of her ideas. Churchill, however, is a playwright of ideas, ideas that are often difficult and, despite her bold theatricality, surprisingly subtle and elusive. Her principal concern is with the issues attendant on the individual’s struggle to emerge from the ensnarements of culture, class, economic systems, and the imperatives of the past. Each of these impediments to the development and happiness of the individual is explored in her works. Not surprisingly for a contemporary female writer, many times she makes use of female characters to explore such themes. 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. 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 ] With designer Georgia Lowe, Hewitt finds an ingenious, haunting way to stage the ghastly parade of hats without a cast of hundreds, but the intimacy of the space works against the play. It diminishes the troubling power of this 50-minute epic, which offers a wake-up call as we sleepwalk towards disaster.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment