Theatre review: Far Away

The usual January trend of grim and serious shows has well and truly continued into February this year, but my diary's due to go into a period with a bit more light relief. Before it can though, a particularly disturbing dystopia - but as it's courtesy of Caryl Churchill, it comes to the stage with unusual flair and extraordinary succinctness, running well under an hour but creating whole worlds in that time. The final show in Michael Longhurst's first year at the Donald and Margot Warehouse is Lyndsey Turner's production of Far Away, which opens with a child, Joan (Sophia Ally or Abbiegail Mills,) unable to sleep on her first night staying at her aunt and uncle's house. Her aunt Harper (Jessica Hynes) tries to comfort her, and discovers that Joan's been disturbed by creeping out of bed at night and witnessing what happens in the shed, where several terrified adults and children have been brought for "processing."

The more we find out about what the child's seen the more we would expect her to be traumatised, but Churchill's authoritarian nightmare is in part about the normalisation of horrors, and when we meet Joan again as an adult (Aisling Loftus) she's starting a colourful new job with an even darker underbelly than the opening scene's.

She's got a much sought-after position designing hats for the parades, and as she meets her new colleague Todd (Simon Manyonda) they gripe about working conditions and pay, and we see the beginning of a romance that will eventually lead to marriage. All the while they're fully aware of what the parades really are - having seen the play before in a more stripped-down production I did wonder if we'd get an army of supernumeraries this time for the scene where the rug gets pulled out from under the audience. Far Away is so short there've been articles written about whether it's good value for money, but it's an extraordinarily dense piece of work with enough going on to keep your mind occupied more than many three-hour epics.

Its deceptive simplicity means I probably remembered the story beats a bit more clearly than I'd like to, and before seeing this production I'd already been thinking about the fact that the play has an unlikely kinship with The Hunger Games in its middle segment - I'm thinking of the indordinate amount of attention on costume design in an event that everyone knows full well is all about bloodshed. Paradoxically, Far Away is also a whimsical show, and I think a lot of its disturbing nature comes from how the horrors reveal themselves in a light touch, with comic moments and a surreal final scene in which not just nations but animals, professions and abstract concepts go to war in ever-shifting alliances. Turner's production comes with an innovative Lizzie Clachan design that hides its various sets inside a rusty metal box; like the play itself, it distracts you with how its next big reveal will work, from the fact that what gets revealed could be horrors.

Far Away by Caryl Churchill is booking until the 4th of April at the Donmar Warehouse.

Running time: 45 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.