A brilliant and unsettling play from one of the UK’s leading dramatists.
At the opening of the play, a young girl is questioning her aunt about having seen her uncle hitting people with an iron bar; by the end, several years later, the whole world is at war – including birds and animals.
Caryl Churchill’s play Far Away is a howl of anguish at the increasing – and increasingly accepted – levels of inhumanity in a world seemingly perpetually involved in conflict.
The play was first performed at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, London, in November 2000.
‘Conjures a devastatingly bleak dystopia… every word, every half sentence paints a picture that would make you laugh if it didn’t want to make you cry… a tiny play, but an immense one. Chilling and thought-provoking’
— WhatsOnStage
‘A dystopia of incomprehensible proportions… a masterclass of spare theatrical writing, encompassing tense family drama, political horror story, romance as well as absurdist comedy’
— A Younger Theatre
‘Perhaps the ultimate fan favourite out of [Churchill’s] kaleidoscopic oeuvre… revered because of how powerfully and pithily it reads on the page… a play to witness Churchill at hurricane force, savage, hilarious, totally unlike anyone else’
— Time Out
‘A short play, but not a small play: it’s global in scope, untethered by time, part fable, part prophecy… interlaces the bucolic, the fantastical and the harrowing, pairing [Churchill’s] characteristic economy with wild, imaginative flourishes… dread-filled, disturbing, and prescient’
— The Stage
‘A twisted fairy tale that demonstrates [Churchill’s] matchless gift for merging the apocalyptic and the fantastical… brilliantly absurdist… A sliver of genius’
— Independent
‘Caryl Churchill was expected to produce something explosive in Far Away, but… she has exceeded the critics’ highest expectations’
— Observer
‘You know you are in the hands of a master’
— Sunday Times
