FAR AWAY

Ambika P3

★★★★

“This play has reached a high point through imaginative design and dramatic setting”

I am a sucker for promenade and immersive theatre (especially one in which the audience is used only as an observer) and this was a real goody. But Far Away is a dystopian drama, so if you are looking for an uplifting evening this will not be for you. It explores dark themes, some of which seem dangerously real.

The descent into hell begins as you enter the ‘theatre’. And already the genius of Rebecca McCutcheon’s production is manifesting. You are received into Ambika 3 through wire barriers guarded by funerary-style ushers, and sent down a long track into the dismal concrete underworld of the University of Westminster building. Below ground you wait, disorientated and huddled with strangers for the ‘curtain’ – rolling steel doors – to go up and you are allowed into the cavernous performance space of a subterranean warehouse.

Caryl Churchill’s play, first produced in 2000 at the Royal Court, explores fear and citizen control, using absurdist scenes. It has had a mixed reception in previous iterations, some calling it ‘a small, oblique masterwork’ (Charles Isherwood), others criticising it for being muddled and lacking in resolution. Here, McCutcheon and her talented production team have married place, play, performance and promenade to extraordinary effect, one which fully explores the play’s foreboding atmosphere and sinister twists. It wasn’t long before I got the sense that I was part of the creation, even though this was billed as a non participatory experience. Sound (Lucy Ann Harrison) and lighting (Jack Hathaway) guide the audience in wandering between the dark corridors and low-lit scenes. Somehow we are also involved too. In Act Two, between scenes, the spotlights on the hatters’ tables are switched off, leaving the audience as silhouettes on the backdrop, with the hats. Are we the people that Joan and Todd are making these hats for? Are we being led to our doom?

The play pivots between three acts – and three primary settings. There is a timeline and character development but no actual explanations of how we got from one act to the next. Joan, the main character (played by Lorna Dale), is a young girl who sees a horrifying event but is gaslighted by her aunt Harper (Lizzie Hopley) when she tries to talk about it. In the next act, 15 years later, she is working with a colleague Todd (Samuel Gosrani) at an apparently creative and satisfying job as a milliner. They may be falling in love. An equally horrifying revelation, turns this scene on its head. The third and final act quickly whisks away any sense that there is going to be a happy ending, or even any ending. War and horror are fully present but, just as sinister, is the uncertainty of anything, even whose side nature is on.

There are strong performances by the actors – Dale perfectly displays bewilderment and vulnerability, with a final soliloquy that is powerfully delivered, Gosrani is magnetic in his turning between cynicism and concern, Hopley gives a subtle performance in the first act as she avoids answering Joan’s questions.

This play has reached a high point through imaginative design and dramatic setting. McCutcheon and the Lost Text/Found Space theatre group that she founded is acclaimed for site specific production and has lifted Far Away to another level. I was left with one reflection: 25 years after Churchill wrote her play, has the absurdism used then, now become a reality of our time?

FAR AWAY

Ambika P3, University of Westminster as part of Camden Fringe Festival 2025

Reviewed on 6th August 2025

by Louise Sibley

Photography by Ellie Kurttz

Previously reviewed at this venue:

PEAKY BLINDERS: RAMBERT’S THE REDEMPTION OF THOMAS SHELBY | ★★★★★ | SADLER’S WELLS THEATRE | August 2025

THREE CHICKENS CONFRONT EXISTENCE | ★★★★★ | EDINBURGH FESTIVAL FRINGE | August 2025

SOME MASTERCHEF SH*T | ★★★★★ | EDINBURGH FESTIVAL FRINGE | August 2025

THE DIANA MIXTAPE | ★★★★★ | HERE AT OUTERNET | July 2025

EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN | ★★★★★ | JERMYN STREET THEATRE | July 2025

SINBAD THE SAILOR | ★★★★★ | LILIAN BAYLIS STUDIO | July 2025

THAT BASTARD, PUCCINI! | ★★★★★ | PARK THEATRE | July 2025

JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND: SEX WITH STRANGERS | ★★★★★ | SOHO THEATRE WALTHAMSTOW | July 2025

R.O.S.E. | ★★★★★ | SADLER’S WELLS EAST | July 2025

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR | ★★★★★ | WATERMILL THEATRE NEWBURY | July 2025

Far Away

★★★½

“The production is deceptively complex and skilfully carried off.”

“Turning you out? What an old-fashioned idea!” the power-hungry property developer Marion exclaims at one point in Owners. Of course, what the play sets out to prove is that it’s not an old-fashioned idea at all, but a painfully immediate one: both in 1972, when Caryl Churchill first wrote it, and now, in Stella Powell-Jones’ production at the Jermyn Street Theatre.

Owners is concerned with property: with having and being had. Clegg wants a son, wants a butcher’s shop, wants Marion, who wants power, who wants Alec, who wants — maybe nothing at all. As Marion ruthlessly develops her London properties, she sets her sights on the flat where Alec is living with his pregnant wife. She also sets her sights on their unborn child. Owners is a play about the need to possess, but it is also a play about the need to be possessed. As it unfolds, sinews of desire stretch and flex between the cast, as they separate and come together, tangled in ever darker threads.

The production is deceptively complex and skilfully carried off. The set, designed by Cat Fuller, is a stroke of genius, with a panorama of doors pressing claustrophobically in on the little family. Fuller uses the tiny space of the theatre’s stage to her advantage. Throughout the piece, everyone vies for exactly the same tiny patch of hotly contested real estate, as a series of hinges and compartments turn one flat into the next. It also means that, even when one person’s life is carefully hinged away, it is still ‘present’ on-stage. All these lives stack on top of each other in a suffocating palimpsest that is extremely effective.

What is initially identifiable as something almost in the vein of farce, grows mesmerizingly misshapen and grotesque as the play leads us down darker avenues. This is underscored by increasingly sinister interludes of music (Sasha Howe and Max Pappenheim) and lighting (Chuma Emembolu) during scene changes, before the lights come back up and we revert to the brightly lit family moment. The sense of something dark and inarticulate shadowing beneath the mundane works very well, especially as Owners gathers speed and becomes more confident in its own surreal cynicism. By the end, it eschews the comfortable escape-routes that something ultimately closer to farce might provide, and instead embraces a grim cannibalistic quality that makes for some beautiful moments of dialogue. Ryan Donaldson as Alec delivers a stunningly haunting hospital scene, and Laura Doddington is incredible as the bullish, smarting Marion (“be quick, be clean, be top, be best”), and a personal highlight.

While the themes are still strikingly relevant, the production shies away from what could be a more current exploration of them. The choice to maintain the 70s setting so distinctly through music and costume (Agata Odolczyk) is visually very effective, but also serves to buffer the play slightly, making it a more comfortable watch. When Clegg the butcher charges a customer just 20p for a pound of mince, a titter goes up from the audience: this is not our world, really, then, and we can breathe a sigh of relief. In the second act, however, when the grim surrealism is allowed more space to unfold, Owners does begin to bite more. Ultimately, though frustratingly lacking in urgency, this is a well-executed piece that leaves you heading back to your cold flat and your rented room with a pit in your stomach.

FAR AWAY

Ambika P3

★★★★

“This play has reached a high point through imaginative design and dramatic setting”

FAR AWAY

Ambika P3, University of Westminster as part of Camden Fringe Festival 2025

Reviewed on 6th August 2025

by Louise Sibley

Photography by Ellie Kurttz

Previously reviewed at this venue:

Far Away

Far Away

Far Away

OWNERS at the Jermyn Street Theatre

★★★½

“The production is deceptively complex and skilfully carried off.”

OWNERS at the Jermyn Street Theatre

Reviewed on 18th October 2023

by Anna Studsgarth

Photography by Steve Gregson

Previously reviewed at this venue:

Owners

Owners

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