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Far Away (NHB Modern Plays)

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In four of her best-known works– Cloud Nine, Top Girls, A Mouthful of Birds, and Vinegar Tom—Churchill presents woman as a cultural concept and displays the power of that concept to submerge and smother the individual female. In Cloud Nine, a parallel is suggested between Western colonial oppression and Western sexual oppression. This oppression is seen first in the family organization and then in the power of the past to demand obligations from the present. Although her characters use geographical distance and literally run away from the past, no one in Cloud Nine can exorcise the ghosts of established practices and traditions. Scott, Aaron (4 September 2012). "Review: Shaking the Tree's Far Away by Caryl Churchill". Portland Monthly . Retrieved 9 June 2020.

Saturday Review - Midnight Family, Masculinities exhibition, Actress by Anne Enright, Far Away by Caryl Churchill, I Am Not Okay With This - BBC Sounds". www.bbc.co.uk . Retrieved 24 May 2020. Far Away” runs Sunday, March 28, at 1 p.m., and Monday and Tuesday, March 29-30, at 7 p.m. Patrons can register to see the show at muhlenberg.edu/seeashow. Of course it's possible to trace recurring themes in Churchill's work - alienation between parent and child, the possibility and failure of revolution. But it is the variety of her work that is most striking. As Von Mayenburg says: "With each play, she discovers new genres and forms. She then discards them and moves on, opening up possibilities for other playwrights to explore. I think many people writing today don't even realise they've been influenced by her. She's changed the language of theatre. And very few playwrights do that." Teleplays: The Judge’s Wife, 1972; Turkish Delight, 1974; The After-Dinner Joke, 1978; The Legion Hall Bombing, 1978; Crimes, 1981. This last image reveals Churchill's preoccupation with Foucault's concept of "docile bodies", bodies disciplined by institutions such as the family or factory into becoming obedient wives/workers, one such being Val, an oppressed rural worker. Val's sudden reappearance is a theatrical coup that left theatre-goers gasping. But she is also pointing to the possibilities of opening up a new "unreal" theatrical space that might encompass a woman's desire not controlled by the male gaze, patriarchy or capitalism.

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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? 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. Politics are incredibly important to Caryl," says Wright, who will direct a reading of Top Girls. "I think she's had so much of her work premiered at the Royal Court because she sees it as an anti-establishment place. That makes it very different from other theatres for her." For Marius von Mayenburg, resident playwright at Berlin's Schaubühne theatre, it is Churchill's ability to capture the "reality of political emotion" that makes her such a distinct voice. "Many German playwrights of the same generation became didactic in their writing," says Von Mayenburg, "but she has taken political theatre to a new level. Her plays ask the important questions. We produced A Number in Berlin, and it captured the audience's anxiety about the dissolution of identity." Far Away starts quietly but develops into a twisted fairy tale that haunts our consciousness with the hyper-reality of a nightmare. With the play’s elliptical poetry and surreal humour, the audience has to work hard to make connections between the scenes, which it transpires are set several years apart. We don’t know for sure what is going on but there are intimations of ethnic cleansing and suppression of dissidents in a totalitarian state, with the political strife ultimately descending into ecological catastrophe.

Whatever her politics and philosophy, Churchill brings a fire and an energy, a special eye and ear, to the postmodern English drama. She is an inspiration to the feminist movement and to women intellectuals around the world. She remains a force crying out for the release of the individual of either gender from the oppressive imperatives of past practices and present expectations. To her art, she contributes an inventive mind and a willingness to invest great energies in wedding the play to the performance. She has continuously rejected linear structure and the use of the master narratives of socialist realism to present her themes. She has also rejected the Brechtean epic theater in favor of using “found objects,” such as various couples in a hotel room or snatches of everyday speech, and re-contextualizing these found objects into new situations that emphasize new meanings. In this way she is much like the famous avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp who made a fountain of a toilet bowl. The play has received high praise from many notable playwrights and has been cited as an inspirational work. Hotel represents yet another structural experimentation for Churchill. It is an opera, with music by Orlando Gough, set in eight identical hotel rooms superimposed together on stage, with actors playing multiple roles. A number of different couples occupy the rooms at one time or another, including a couple having an adulterous affair and another couple who are homosexual. A television set also figures as a major character. By doubling and tripling the actors in various roles, Churchill subtly emphasizes the commonality of human oppression and pain. Taylor, Paul; Williams, Holly (18 August 2019). "The 40 best plays to read before you die". The Independent . Retrieved 9 June 2020. To celebrate her 70th birthday this month, the Royal Court is inviting a number of playwrights, myself included, to direct readings of Churchill's work. Over two weeks, a chronological selection will be presented, from Owners - with its tang of Joe Orton and its prescient portrait of an obsession with ownership - right through to her plays of the past decade, including the disintegrating anti-plays that make up the double bill Blue Heart, and the disturbing fable of a world at war with itself, Far Away.When the play first premiered at the Royal Court 20 years ago, its war-torn setting could have alluded to the bubbling tensions between the superpowers of the West and the Middle East, which would eventually boil over into the Iraq war three years later. But in 2020, its frictious landscape seems to speak of the refugee crisis, people-smuggling, zero-hours contracts and Brexit-inspired suspicion of foreigners. 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. Provocative and disturbing, “Far Away” offers an incisive exploration of fear and tyranny in a dystopian — but uncomfortably familiar — world at war.

De Angelis, April (7 September 2012). "Caryl Churchill: changing the language of theatre". The Guardian . Retrieved 19 May 2020. Behrends, Al (16 October 2009). "Far Away, Seven Jewish Children, and Seven Palestinian Children begin Theatre Season at Gustavus Adolphus College". Gustavus Adolphus College . Retrieved 6 November 2009. a b David, Benedict (29 August 2018). "Caryl Churchill at 80 – celebrating UK theatre's 'ultimate playwright' ". The Stage . Retrieved 9 August 2021. Deeply disturbing. Far Away has the picturesque form and gentle rhythms of a fairy tale told at bedtime. But it also finds a grating alarm in traditional sounds of comfort, from the lapping of a stream and the lilt of a lullaby to the hesitating confidences exchanged by a boy and girl falling in love... I can think of no contemporary playwright who combines such scope of imagination and depth of purpose. -Ben Brantley, New York Times

Dystopian drama ‘Far Away’ offers disturbing glimpses of a world at war

From her early historical, epic Brechtian plays to the more surreal later plays, Churchill has lit a blazing trail. Her career is unmatched in contemporary theatre and she stands with the greats in insisting, with brilliance, on her vision.

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