‘Intense, steely and wonderfully unsettling’ : Far Away Review
‘Far Away’ is on at Corpus Playroom until the 1st of March
Director Enya Crowley brings Caryl Churchill’s absurdist and dystopian drama to Corpus Playroom during Week 5/6 of Lent Term: a production that is short, intense, dynamic and gripping.
Images of ‘Far Away’ taken by Thomas Holland
Churchill’s play follows the story of three named characters: Joan (Lucy Brittain), her aunt Harper (Emma Lewis), and Todd, her colleague then lover and husband (Joe Orrell). One night, Joan, a child, stumbles upon the sinister and bloody secrets of an authoritarian regime. Years later, she works as a hat-maker, alongside Todd – she seems to be fully incorporated into the machine of propaganda. Some time passes, and the world has descended into all-out war: ‘world’ in every sense, since all aspects of nature – birds, bears, and even the laws of gravity – have turned against one another.
The tight-knit cast of three achieve the unlikely in delivering a fantastic and convincing performance in an inherently absurd and bizarre play. Lewis is an especially ominous stage presence, portraying Harper with a chilling energy – smiling in her moments of deceit, but with a flame of danger in her eyes. The focused chemistry of the cast is also marvellous to witness. Brittain and Lewis conjure an almost painfully tense atmosphere in Joan and Harper’s opening dialogue, whilst Orrell and Brittain’s handling of absurdity – the pregnant and brilliantly uncomfortable pauses in their conversation – in the hat-making scenes allows comedy to chime through uneasiness.
“brings out problems of seeing and unseeing”
The production’s sound design stands out as particularly impressive. The scenes are punctuated by a synth loop mixed with an agitated soundscape of nature – of billowing gales, of birdsong. The choice to have these hints of nature only in the sound design and in various projected flashes of bright green brilliantly furthers a dissociative sense of reality; ecological disaster is happening – it is happening in the narrative, evidenced in Todd’s bear scar; in the final monologues; in the tortured screams – but for the audience, we are only allowed inside the refuge of Harper’s house, and therefore blind to anything close to visceral. This production brings out problems of seeing and unseeing and questions our own complicity and blindness to the injured and burning world around us.
Images of ‘Far Away’ taken by Thomas Holland
Staging a Churchill play is always brave and ambitious, especially for students; apart from the intellectual material, there is also the problem of logistics. The cast list at the start of Far Away reads:
The Parade (Scene 2.5): five is too few and twenty better than ten. A hundred?
The only aspect of this production that falls short is the handling of this scene – the macabre and almost burlesque parade, a procession to execution. In place of live actors, a film of perhaps eight people – clean, well-dressed, wearing differing degrees of preposterous hats – is projected onto the walls; they can be seen from their waists up and walking in a single-file line. Whilst this digital aspect continues the theme of moral dissociation, there is very little suggestion of the horror of Churchill’s original direction:
A procession of ragged, beaten, chained prisoners, each wearing a hat, on their way to execution. The finished hats are even more enormous and preposterous than in the previous scene.
It may be possible for an audience member unfamiliar with Churchill’s script to miss the explicit portrayal of institutionally murder crucial to the play (only mentioned in passing in Todd and Joan’s dialogue in the following scene: “It seems so sad to burn them with the bodies.”). I also feel some regret, in the fact that this scene holds so much potential for the unsettling carnivalesque that the production has otherwise achieved so well.
“moral certainty is disrupted”
This production of Far Away homes in on the moral numbness that acutely pertinent to the difficulty of protest practises surrounding climate change and disaster; it touches upon the idea of “offshore logic”, a term Zadie Smith has coined to label the phenomenon of perception where "everything we don't want to think about happens somewhere else." Our sense of comfort and moral certainty is disrupted in the cozy warmth of Corpus Playroom, as we are transported into a surreal dystopian reality that rings terrifyingly precise and true.