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

“hits its most climactic point with a whole third of the script still to go”

If you ever did an A-Level in Drama in sixth form or college, chances are you already know Caryl Churchill’s work quite well, and had probably exhaustively analysed every detail of her scripts through waffling and meandering essays. For those for whom Far Away was one of those plays (like myself), actually seeing it performed in the Donmar Warehouse’s new production directed by Lyndsey Turner will no doubt be an exhilarating experience, although the extent to which it stands up to those reams of analysis, especially in our current socio-political climate, is arguable.

Far Away happens in three distinct sections. The first sees a young Joan (Sophie Ally and Abbiegail Mills) disturbing her aunt Harper (Jessica Hynes) late at night, unable to sleep after having seen something shocking and violent outside. The scene carries tension masterfully as Harper tries to weave a false narrative that explains away what Joan saw, only for Joan to drop a series of atom bomb revelations about what she experienced. The second section builds on the deceit of the first by portraying Joan now as a young adult (Aisling Loftus), starting a new job designing hats for a forthcoming parade alongside seasoned hat-maker Todd (Simon Manyonda). Todd slowly starts to disrupt the worldview that Harper’s lies had entrenched in Joan, as the true nature of the hat parade is unveiled in the most breathtaking moment of whole play. Which, if you’re keeping count, is an issue because Far Away hits its most climactic point with a whole third of the script still to go.

The final section jumps forward in time once more, while also jumping stylistically from straightforward realism to nigh-on absurdism, as the characters explain how enemies in the all-out war that’s erupted have weaponised the likes of mosquitoes and light, but that Latvian dentists can be trusted. Perhaps it’s an exploration of mankind’s tendency towards destruction and violence and how it will eventually embroil everything with it. Perhaps it’s a comment on paranoia and conspiracy theorists. Or perhaps it means nothing at all. It feels so much like stepping into a completely different play rather than a continuation of the one that’s just preceded it that it practically renders the previous two sections irrelevant. The complete abandonment of the momentum that had been built prior also grinds the final scene down to what is essentially a ten page exposition dump – the characters are indiscernible, the inter-relationships are meaningless, and the dialogue is filled with sluggish lists.

Every aspect of Far Away which had previously been stellar falls to the wayside at this point – Lizzie Clachan’s striking and ominous design that reveals more of its world as the script does finds itself with nothing to do; likewise with Peter Mumford’s foreboding lighting. Where Hynes and Manyonda at first carried driving undertones of dark, shady deeds being done just out of sight juxtaposing with Loftus’ innocence, the play’s conclusion leaves them directionless as Turner can’t successfully find the connective sinew between the final scene and the first two. The result is a deeply anticlimactic play, that offers as much dystopian insight as the likes of The Hunger Games – that’s not a knock against The Hunger Games, but without its thrills and action, Far Away delivers pretty much the same experience as just turning on the news.

Reviewed by Ethan Doyle

Photography by Johan Persson

Tag Archives: Far Away

FAR AWAY

★★★★

Ambika P3

FAR AWAY

Ambika P3

★★★★

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

FAR AWAY