Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Far Away

Caryl Churchill’s play about power
Patalog
by
ABR Arts 17 July 2023

Far Away

Caryl Churchill’s play about power
Patalog
by
ABR Arts 17 July 2023
Alison Whyte as Harper and Darcy Sterling-Cox as Young Joan (photograph by Cameron Grant).
Alison Whyte as Harper and Darcy Sterling-Cox as Young Joan (photograph by Cameron Grant).

Now an octogenarian, and with more than thirty plays to her name, Caryl Churchill must be the English-speaking theatre’s nearest equivalent to a rock star of a certain age. It’s no exaggeration to say that without her plays – which, like Samuel Beckett’s, have become increasingly spare and crystalline over time, some running to as little as ten minutes – it would be hard to imagine the existence of whole generations of British playwrights, from Martin Crimp and Mark Ravenhill, to Alistair McDowall and Lucy Kirkwood.

Not one but three of Churchill’s plays are being produced in Melbourne as I write: Far Away at fortyfivedownstairs in a production by independent theatre company Patalog, and the double-bill of What If If Only (2021) and Escaped Alone (2016), which opens at the Melbourne Theatre Company next month. Red Stitch tackled the latter in recent years. While other playwrights fall in and out of cultural favour, Churchill – like our own Patricia Cornelius, another veteran ‘playwright’s playwright’ nevertheless able to command serious public interest – seems destined to defy the vagaries of fashionableness.

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.