Aina García Coll

aigari@alumni.uv.es

CARYL CHURCHILL Far Away

A play first performed at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Sloane Square, London on 24 November, 2000. It is a play in three acts subdivided in scenes. It is contemporary and written in prose.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

JOAN: She is presented as a young innocent girl in the first act. She is still a child but is smart and awake and not easy to lie to. Therefore, she asks uneasy questions to her aunt and tries to discover what happens around pretending to believe the lies she tells her to come afterwards with facts which bring to the light their falsedom. Later, she will appear as a young woman who works as a hat-maker. She is not very combative and accepts her bad situation. However, she will resign if his more combative partner Todd is fired.

HARPER: She is Joan’s aunt. She is immersed in a kind of organisation or something which is in war nowadays. Then she is really aware about who could or could not be her friend. Moreover, she will strongly consider herself on the “good”’s side and therefore considers she has the right to give support to the commitment of murders and crimes on the “bad”’s side.

TODD: He is Joan’s work companion in hat-making. He is quite concerned about his working situation and does not want to accept it as he has been working as a hat-maker for many years. He has a combative mind and will try to better his situation. In the third act, though, he talks with Harper about that nonsensical war they are immersed in. He seems to be quite aware and concerned about the ones on his and Harper’s side.

PLOT: Joan is with her aunt Harper about going to bed. She then starts asking her aunt about some strange things she has seen happening in the house that night. She has seen her uncle pushing and hitting some people from a lorry into the shed. Her aunt answers that she has found a secret and that her uncle is helping those people escape. However, the girl keeps asking questions about what she has seen even though her aunt will just answer they are on the side of the people who are putting things right.

Time has passed. Joan has grown up and is now a hat-maker with her friend Todd. They are making hats for a parade. They discuss the way they are treated and payed for them. They continue decorating the hats and are playing a kind of game about talking about themselves. They are finishing the hats which have become big and extravagant. They recall that about the way they are paid and the corruptness of their management. The hats have got really big. Todd is going to talk to the manager about their wages. The hats are for a procession of chained prisoners who are shown on their way to execution. They continue with new hats. It seems they have won a prize for the beauty of their hats. Todd tells Joan about his conversation with the boss. He said that those things should be “thought about”. Joan tells him that if he looses his job she will resign.

Some years later. Harper and Todd are in Harper house. They make a review around who is in “their side”. They talk about animals, jobs, etc…in a kind of everything’s war where even the physical and meteorological phenomena are on one of the sides.

SPACE: The play is developed in two different spaces. First, characters are in Harper’s house. After that they go to a hat factory to come back to the end of the play to Harper’s house.

TIME: The play is not continuous. Each act talks about a period. Between them there are differences of months or even years as we can see when the author says “several years later” to introduce and locate us in a new act.

LITERARY RESOURCES: Language is simple but it has some metaphors that could be difficult to understand.

PERSONAL OPINION: A really interesting play. It is original, creative and at the same time critical and, in a special metaphoric way, extremely realistic. I could not read it without thinking in actual events which happen everyday in our world and which are in a way caricaturised in this play. Firstly, it is interesting to notice the conversation between the young Joan and Harper. A conversation between innocence and encrypted cruelty; a conversation in which the young girl is answered with incoherent and nonsensical arguments about horrible crimes which are being committed in the name of the ones on the “good side”. But even a child is not so simple to believe so easily and accept such crimes as good and fair.

It is also interesting to see the way in which Caryl Churchill, considered as a socialist player, introduces fairly something about the explotation of workers and corruptness of the managers. And also their inability to fight against those behaviours towards them without risking too much.

Finally, it is a great ending the one in the third act. Recalling something simmilar to the first act, the two characters discuss who knows best the side on which they are, and make a funny great review of a world in which everyone belongs to one side which is compulsorily set at odds with another side. The funny thing is that it sounds absurd. The tragic thing is that it is more realistic than it seems. They try to re-affirm themselves on the good side, “You don’t know which side I’m on?”, to justify the massacres they commit. As I said I consider this very realistic and a great metaphoric way to see our current world situation.