Far Away (NHB Modern Plays)

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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. Mark Ravenhill has said that seeing the play was "one of my most revelatory moments at the Royal Court" and that "[watching the play] you feel your brain re-wiring itself on your sense of how language works, and who we are in that moment sort of neurologically shifting." [23] 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..." Even more idiosyncratic in structure is the powerful A Mouthful of Birds, in which the stories of seven contemporary personas are interwoven with the ancient ritualistic events of Euripides’ Bakchai (405 b.c.e.; The Bacchae, 1781). Dionysus, the Greek God of wine, appears throughout the piece dancing in a modern woman’s petticoat. Amid ancient scenes of ecstasy and emotional and physical violence, the modern characters appear in their normal daily activities. They each present a monologue in which they attempt to explain why they have failed to meet their obligations. Secret and mysterious problems of possession emerge. The atmosphere of the play is charged with the sensuality of accepted violence, violence intermingled with the irresistible quality of sex. One woman character, for example, who is stereotypically squeamish about skinning a dead rabbit for supper, calmly tells her husband to go to the bathroom, where he will find their baby drowned. Churchill juxtaposes this modern violence against the culminating terror of The Bacchae, the gruesome moment when Agave, in a Dionysian ecstasy, tears apart the body of her son Pentheus.

It was tiring there because everything’s been recruited, 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. The Bolivians are working with gravity, that’s a secret so as not to spread alarm. But we’re getting further with noise and there’s thousands dead of light in Madagascar. Who’s going to mobilise darkness and silence? After a disturbing childhood episode, the audience next meets Joan hard at work in a hat factory, making elaborate and fanciful hats for some unknown purpose, which grows increasingly ominous as play progresses. Muhlenberg’s costume shop has been hard at work creating a variety of darkly funky headgear, as envisioned by costume designer Maxine Stone, a sophomore at Muhlenberg. This strange, unsettling piece needs to be directed with steely rigour, and it isn’t quite tough enough in JMK award-winner Kate Hewitt’s revival, which is staged on the traverse in the tiny Clare space. Even so, there’s a terrific, layered performance from Samantha Colley as the adult Joan, a young woman who worries about corruption in the hat factory where she works, alongside Todd (a very good Ariyon Bakare), but who completely accepts the trials and executions for which she helps make prize-winning millinery. Alice Saville of Exeunt wrote, "Churchill subtly scrapes away at the selectiveness of the stories we tell to give our world value, to make it feel safe and cosy." [17] Paul Ewing of Londonist asserted that "it's unsettling enough to leave the audience nervously laughing. [...] What may have seemed far away then looks a bit prophetic now." [18] Aleks Sierz of The Arts Desk said in 2020, "I do love this play, but I must admit that – unlike Churchill's very best work – its meaning doesn't deepen very much over the decades. [...] the nature of visions is that they either come literally true, or they remain visionary. And this one remains what it always was: a beautifully imagined fantastical nightmare." [19] Far Away was described as a "great play" on Saturday Review. [20] Reception from playwrights [ edit ]Billington, Michael (19 February 2014). "Never mind 1984: Michael Billington's top five theatrical dystopias". The Guardian . Retrieved 30 March 2021.

Cheney, Matthew (14 April 2011). "Dystopia on Stage: Caryl Churchill's Far Away". Tor.com . Retrieved 9 June 2020. Churchill has also worked with educational institutions such as the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She and school director Mark Wing-Davey took a group of ten graduate students to Bucharest, where they worked with students at the Romanian Institute of Theatre and Cinema on the creation of Mad Forest. Woman as Cultural Concept The British playwright Caryl Churchill has written a great number of extraordinary plays, many of them enlivened by impossible events. Churchill is a staunchly political writer, a writer who seeks to challenge audiences’ complacencies about the real life of the real world, but flights of imagination give resonance to her unblinking view of reality’s horrors, using the unreal to probe the deep grammar of reality.In the first scene a young girl, Joan (a role shared by Sophia Ally and Abbiegail Mills) is staying with Hynes’s Harper, who would appear to be her aunt, for reasons that are unclear– a holiday? An evacuation? In a morbidly comic dialogue, she tells Harper about the brutal treatment of a group of prisoners she witnessed at the hands of her uncle; Harper keeps trying to come up with innocuous explanations, which are drolly undercut in turn by Joan as she relates some new detail she saw.