Sian Prior reviews Far Away for Culture Club, 774 Drive, ABC Radio
See the review in its original context here.
If…you want to be surprised, even a bit disturbed by a visit to the theatre – try ‘Far Away’, a play that’s on at 45 Downstairs in Flinders Lane, written by the award-winning English playwright Caryl Churchill. I’ve been thinking about this play ever since I saw it last weekend. Churchhill is known for her non-naturalistic approach to theatre – she’s a political playwright…politics in the broader sense of power and the uses and abuses of it. The play is divided into three different scenes and as the first one opens, we see a child who has woken up in the middle of the night approaching a woman in a kitchen. We learn the woman is her aunt and the child gradually reveals that she’s just witnessed a deeply disturbing scene outside in the garden. There’s been violence and blood and the child is trying to make sense of it all. And the aunt is trying to first of all explain what the child has seen, but then – we realize – she’s trying to cover up what’s been happening. We see the world from the child’s perspective as she tries to understand adult behaviour that, on the face of it, is simply terrifying. We’re in moral quicksand as the aunt keeps changing her story. What IS going on out there in the garden shed? – we never really find out.
Then in the second scene the child has grown up and is a young woman working in a hat factory. But we gradually find out that the hats are to be worn by prisoners just before they’re put to death. What is going on? The prisoners come out chained together but wearing these glamourous Melbourne Cup-style hats and do a parade, accompanied by jolly band music, a scene which is simultaneously hilarious and sickening.
In the final scene things get weirder and weirder. The whole world is at war, but as in George Orwell’s ‘1984’, the enemy keeps changing – sometimes it’s the Brazilians, sometimes it’s the crocodiles or the deer, or perhaps even the river is at war with the people.
There is an incredibly dystopian view of the future embedded in this play which touches you somewhere very deep and very dark. Good and evil, truth and fiction, are never clear and morality is in a constant state of slippage. It might seem a bit like some of your weirdest nightmares ,where you’re struggling to make sense of what’s going on and maybe relieved when you finally wake up and discover it was all coming from your sub-conscious.
The underground theatre space in 45 Downstairs adds to sense of claustrophobia. This is a play produced on a small budget but with beautiful acting by the performers playing the three main characters – Caroline lee, Paul Ashcroft and Suzannah MacDonald.
This is the kind of theatre that I like – it takes you to a completely different place, asks you difficult questions, and rather than offering you pat answers, it leaves you wondering.
‘Far Away’ is on at 45 Downstairs until May 13th.