“A masterpiece of everyday horror”
As we prepare to stage Far Away, Lyn Gardner reflects on the immeasurable influence of Caryl Churchill
Over the last 60 years British theatre has produced many great playwrights, but it has only produced one who surprises with every new play and who never repeats herself.
Her name is Caryl Churchill, and while Pinter may have his devotees and Stoppard his admirers it is the self-effacing Churchill who has been the great theatrical disruptor of the age. Ask young writers, theatre-makers and directors about the playwrights they most admire, and it is Churchill’s name which most often trips off their tongues.
Her influence spreads out far and wide across British theatre. Her courage makes everyone else working in theatre braver, and more willing to try something new. Her generosity — she is famous for actually replying to early career directors who seek her advice on staging her plays — sets an example to everyone with successful theatre careers.
Since her first major success, Owners, a story of grasping landlords staged at the Royal Court in 1972, Churchill has been challenging herself and audiences in over 40 plays of unparalleled variety, playfulness and experimentation. As the critic Alastair Macaulay once observed she is a visionary who “writes the plays she needs to write, not the plays that theatres want to present.”
That’s crucial because frequently when a playwright has a success with one play, theatres often want more of the same. Director Dominic Dromgoole has suggested that “her particular courage is that every time she starts, she seems to wipe her own slate well and truly clean. Most good writers are able to ignore what others are writing or have written, but very few are strong enough to ignore the allure of their own previous work.”
Churchill’s refusal to be boxed in by other’s expectations has allowed her to be a theatrical adventurer and one who has always followed her instincts, her interests and her imagination. She worked collaboratively as a writer with companies such as Joint Stock and Monstrous Regiment and with choreographers and musicians long before such ways of theatre-making were embraced by the mainstream.
Her restless curiosity and inquisitiveness — both about our fast-changing world and what theatre is and can be — means she has always been ahead of the curve. She is often so prescient that it makes you wonder whether she has a crystal ball secreted in the drawer of her writing desk. But she doesn’t just show us how we so often sleepwalk our way towards catastrophe, she analyses why we do so with forensic thoughtfulness and humanity. Her work has a rare moral confidence.
Cloud Nine (1979) was a mercilessly funny investigation into the links between patriarchy and colonisation, Top Girls (1982) subverted a traditional three act structure to effortlessly navigate its way from surrealism through realism to naturalism to examine feminism and individualism in the Thatcher era. The satirical Serious Money (1987) looked at the unbridled excesses of the deregulation of the City — and did it in rhyming couplets. A Number (2002) considered cloning and pre-empted today’s identity debates, and 2012’s Love and Information dived into communication in the digital era taking a form that reflected what it might feel like to have fallen inside the internet.
Where Churchill leads others often follow. That is certainly true of Far Away (2000) which is being staged at the Donmar early next year by director Lyndsey Turner who has recently revived two major Churchill plays — Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) and Top Girls — both for the National Theatre.
Far Away, described by Turner as “the last great play of the previous century and the first great play of this one,” is a play of terrible haunting beauty, bleak comedy and apocalyptic foreboding which offered a glimpse of our potential future long before dystopian dramas became fashionable.
Set in a near future, the play moves from the apparently cosy English countryside, where there are disturbing sounds coming from the woodshed, to outright terror and a world at war with itself (even the weather is taking sides and elephants and deer are committing war crimes) in around 60 minutes.
But Far Away is no miniature: like that other great writer Beckett, Churchill has moved increasingly over the years to show that less can be more. She never wastes a word. She chooses each one as if it is a hand grenade that sets off explosive disturbances that ripple through each line and layer of the play. Like 2016’s Escaped Alone, Far Away is a masterpiece of everyday horror, of the atrocities lurking beneath apparent normality, of what happens when humans start to prey on each other, when everyone refuses to speak out and puts on painted smiles instead.
It’s a play that over the last two decades has become ever more urgent as global and cultural shifts and scientific advances makes Far Away seem so much less far away. In a rare public pronouncement (she hasn’t given a newspaper interview since 1997) Churchill once said that “playwrights don’t give answers, they ask questions.” Far Away reminds that she is our greatest theatrical inquisitor.
Lyn Gardner is Associate Editor of the Stage and reviews theatre for @stagedoorapp.com
Far Away is at the Donmar 6 February — 21 March 2020. Click here to find out more.
