Far Away at the Donmar February 2020

This revival of Caryl Churchill’s twenty-year-old play, Far Away, is a both riveting and confusing. The plot is sparse - three acts which feel tenuously connected. At times, the play feels like a dystopian pastiche, at others, it delivers a stunning visual and conceptual experience.

When the play was over, my friends and I were wracking our brains to understand - to put the pieces together in some meaningful way. The amazing result is that it actually worked. I did find meaning and with some soul-searching, I found connection as well. I did feel confronted by some painful truths, particularly in relation to how we humans accept some of the most unacceptable situations when we really do not have to. Churchill highlights techniques of avoidance which I would rather not face, and she does so in ways that I couldn’t pull my eyes away from.

In the first act, Churchill has a child trying to understand an appalling wrong she has witnessed, by asking in an amusingly circuitous series of questions rather than directly addressing the blunt facts of what she has seen.

The second act shows some workers tasked with an outrageous job, yet throughout the process, they speak and think only of their own feelings, never seeming to give any consideration to their place in an utterly devastating ritual.

Coming after the dramatic staging of act two, the third and final act felt a bit flat visually, but the conceptual content more than made up for it, as Churchill puts her brilliant imagination to work creating a world in which some aspects of war are taken to their absurd extreme. I love it when a writer gets me to imagine something I’d never thought of before. This bit alone, made it worth the price of admission.

Overall, I found this play to be bold, thought- provoking and imaginative. I recommend it with two caveats: first, don’t go expecting a traditional plot; second, the play’s runtime is only 45 minutes. For me, the time flew by - which is generally a good thing, but I did feel a bit let down when it was time to go. In other words, expect to leave wanting more.