Far Away [theatre]

Caryl Churchill’s 2000 play Far Away opens not with a dramatic bang, but with a surreal calm, and a focus that marks this as one of her more intimate works. Theatre director John Sheedy paints the picture: “One of the first things audiences will see is this very quiet, elderly woman sitting there, darning a sock into a thing. It’s very simple, and it all unfolds and unfolds and unfolds and unfolds into something bigger and more complex.”

It unfolds into a work that twists theatrical convention and plays with audience expectation. Its neatly slides into the Black Swan Theatre Company’s varied 2008 programme, sitting alongside The Caucasian Chalk Circle as another example of 'Theatre that Challenges.' For Sheedy, “Caryl Churchill is one of the greatest British playwrights, because she’s always re-inventing form and function in her writing. She’s developed and always pushing the extreme, asking the big questions. They’re always, always political. She’s always speaking through the voice of the minority, through the little man and it’s mainly to do with women, because she’s a feminist writer as well.”

Sheedy describes Far Away as one of the first big steps in terms in what we perceive as a play, particularly in terms of its structure. It’s a play that jumps through time and space with no apology or explanation. “She makes giant leaps with nothing in between, and we’ve got to use our imagination to fill them,” Sheedy urges. “That’s what I love about her work, and particularly her later work, is that she’s forcing the viewer to use their imagination to fit in what’s happening in between – she doesn’t hand feed you the information.”

With a recurring interest in intertwining disparate realities, Churchill uses Far Away to slam together three separate scenes while eradicating any semblance of segue. The quiet first scene evolves into a conversation between the elderly woman and her little grand-daughter, Joan, but then, suddenly, there is a jolt into a future reality, where Joan now works with a friend in a factory, painstakingly crafting elaborate hats. Then, once more, the story lurches forward and into a landscape where the whole world is at war and Joan herself has become a leader in that conflict. “You don’t resolve [those shifts],” Sheedy emphasises. “Instead, you make them as bold and as clear and as definite as you can. You don’t apologise for it, as [Churchill] doesn’t in her writing.”

Churchill herself is also careful never to give away any clues, avoiding interviews and public appearance so that there can only be blind guesses as to her intention. “That’s what great about plays like Far Away, though, in a way when you don’t have all the answers there, and it’s a blank canvas with a big idea, it’s how you interpret it and what you discover and what you unpick,” explains Sheedy. “And there’s an amazing cast that I have, and they also discover stuff with you. I go in there having a fairly good idea of what she’s saying in this piece of writing and I also have a very strong vision to take the team through, but of course they always add and they add, which is wonderful. It’s one of those tricky plays, as we’ve discovered, just when you think you know what it’s about and you’ve nailed it, you go back one step and you go, ‘Actually is it this?’ And you have another question about it, and then you think you’ve sold that and you discover you’ve got another question. It’s wonderful though too, it’s exciting.”

It’s the kind of play that offers its director room to move through visual and technical experimentation. Sheedy is careful not to give too much away but mentions that the company has described his interpretation as “a mini opera,” and that it includes fifty choreographed extras as well a “large visual object.” He’s quick to assert, however, that this freedom is not absolute. “Visually yes, absolutely, you have that freedom, but… the language is so honest and so, I guess, that text, because it’s so descriptive the language, you’ve got to make sure you’re on the money and you’ve got it right so you don’t really have the freedom there. It’s the honesty, the absolute honesty of that voice, you can’t deny it and it’s terrifying to work on. It guides you so clearly and grabs hold of you and really tells you where to go.”

For Sheedy, this text is a blur of challenges and didactic intent. It’s a story that’s topical in all its strangeness, questioning mankind’s current trajectory with a nod to the absurdity of recent wars. “Some [audience members] will change, hopefully,” Sheedy anticipates, “and think about their own value system and what they do in the world and how they partake as a human being on this planet. Others will be confused and they won’t get it, and that’s OK as well. When you’re talking about how the rocks at war with gravity and the grass is at war and the Koreans and the elephants are on one side and the cats are with the French and dentists are with pigs and you don’t know what side the river is on, that all sounds crazy but actually I know what she’s saying and it kind of makes sense when you read it or listen to it and you just stop and just actually absorb that information and the chaos.

“You go ‘OK, this is actually where we’re all heading.’ We’re so advanced technically, too clever for ourselves. We’ve not keeping things simple, we’re impatient and we’re developing every day. War comes with that as well. The more we want to own, the more impatient we become, the more we develop, the more confusing and complex we become, the more something shuts down because it’s too much. Where do we fit in the middle of that?"

For a fifty minute play, Far Away is dense with themes and questions. Sheedy’s advice is for audience members to just sit back and listen carefully, without necessarily seeking instant understanding. “You probably won’t even get an answer until the next morning when you wake up, or maybe even the following week,” he confesses. “I do believe that it’s one of those good pieces of writing that sit with you for over a week or two weeks afterwards. Like any good book or play or film that you see or read. A good story will sit with you and have an afterlife, whether you like it or not. And there will be people there saying ‘what sort of play is that?’ and there will be people who find it incredible. There is no in between with this play, and that’s what I find exciting.”