Far Away (NHB Modern Plays)

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Top Girls is a depiction of the exploitation of women by women, a technique well learned through generations of women being exploited by men. The play portrays a group of friends, all successful women in the fields of literature and the arts, who gather for a dinner to celebrate Marlene’s promotion to an executive position in the Top Girls employment agency. Viewers are introduced to scenes of Marlene’s workplace and to her working-class sister and niece, Angie. In a painful end to Top Girls, Churchill reveals how one woman character is willing to sacrifice her very motherhood to maintain her position in the world of business, a world that the play shows to be created by and for men. Following a bitter argument between Marlene and her lower-class sister, it is also revealed that Marlene’s “niece” is actually her illegitimate daughter. 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.

Thompson, Jessie (13 February 2020). "Far Away review: Caryl Churchill's sinister vision of the future". Evening Standard . Retrieved 19 May 2020.

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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. A German production, entitled In weiter Ferne, opened in April 2001 at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin, directed by Falk Richter. [26] Far Away opens on a girl questioning her aunt about having seen her uncle hitting people with an iron bar. Several years later, the whole world is at war - including birds and animals. The girl has returned to her aunt to take refuge and begins to describe her journey: There were piles of bodies and if you stopped to find out there was one killed by coffee or one killed by pins, they were killed by heroin, petrol, chainsaws, hairspray, bleach, foxgloves, the smell of smoke was where we were burning the grass that wouldn't serve..." Far Away lasts a bare 50 minutes, but Godwin's production makes it feel like a wake-up slap to the face, as we sleepwalk towards a future in which governments have played on terror to make us fear ourselves and in which resource wars set country against country. It may be a decade old, but this is a play that feels more resonant than ever. Billington, Michael (19 February 2014). "Never mind 1984: Michael Billington's top five theatrical dystopias". The Guardian . Retrieved 30 March 2021.

Taylor, Paul (24 November 2006). "Drunk Enough To Say I Love You?, Royal Court Theatre, London". The Independent . Retrieved 27 May 2020. 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. 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. Muhlenberg offers Bachelor of Arts degrees in theatre and dance. The Princeton Review ranked Muhlenberg’s theatre program in the top twelve in the nation for eight years in a row, and Fiske Guide to Colleges lists both the theatre and dance programs among the top small college programs in the United States. Muhlenberg is one of only eight colleges to be listed in Fiske for both theatre and dance. Far Away was first produced at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London in November/December 2000.

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The final scene brings Harper, Joan, and Todd together at the end of the world. A war has begun, but not an ordinary war: a war of, quite literally, everything against everything. Joan and Todd are now married, and Joan has run to Harper’s house to see Todd and get away from the war for a day. It’s clear, though, that there really is no escape, no rest. It’s hard for them to tell what is with us and what’s against us, and what “us” means anymore. (Harper asks Todd if he’d feed a hungry deer if it came into the yard. “Of course not,” Todd says. “I don’t understand that,” Harper says, “because the deer are with us. They have been for three weeks.”) Behrends, Al (16 October 2009). "Far Away, Seven Jewish Children, and Seven Palestinian Children begin Theatre Season at Gustavus Adolphus College". Gustavus Adolphus College . Retrieved 6 November 2009. Marlowe, Sam (13 February 2020). "Far Away review — this Hell is terrifyingly close to home". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 18 May 2020. 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.

Hotel represents yet another structural experimentation for Churchill. It is an opera, with music by Orlando Gough, set in eight identical hotel rooms superimposed together on stage, with actors playing multiple roles. A number of different couples occupy the rooms at one time or another, including a couple having an adulterous affair and another couple who are homosexual. A television set also figures as a major character. By doubling and tripling the actors in various roles, Churchill subtly emphasizes the commonality of human oppression and pain. Far Away starts quietly but develops into a twisted fairy tale that haunts our consciousness with the hyper-reality of a nightmare. With the play’s elliptical poetry and surreal humour, the audience has to work hard to make connections between the scenes, which it transpires are set several years apart. We don’t know for sure what is going on but there are intimations of ethnic cleansing and suppression of dissidents in a totalitarian state, with the political strife ultimately descending into ecological catastrophe. Summertime … Nikki Amuka-Bird and Joshua James in Sex from Love and Information at the Royal Court, 2012. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian Throughout her writing life Churchill has experimented with form as well as process, which is why the question "What is a Caryl Churchill play?" is hard to answer; they are protean. Churchill is a playwright with a body of work that has continually responded to the "form and pressure of the times", as if she has turned the idea of what a play should be over and over, revisioning it beyond the accepted imaginative boundaries, to produce plays that are always revolutionary. Blue/Heart throws a spanner into the mechanism of each one-act play (in her work, a slash marks out when a character cuts into another's monologue). In Heart's Desire, while a family await the return of their daughter from Australia, the play constantly "resets itself" as if infected by a virus, so that we witness 25 rewindings and a resulting host of unexpected events – the entrance of a 10ft-bird or a class of school children. In Blue Kettle, as a young man pretends to be the long-lost son of various women, a "virus" affects language so that selectively words are replaced by either "blue" or "kettle" until the play at last is extinguished under the weight of non-communication. In "destroying" both plays Churchill asks questions about identity; are we more fluid than the stabilities of language and plotting in conventional narrative suggest? 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.”Betsko, Kathleen, and Rachel Koenig, comps. Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987. 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.