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

★★★

“it is impossible not to enjoy all the good humoured larking about in this production”

Imagine a gritty Cinderella set in a northern karaoke pub, and you have the premise for Not Too Tame’s version, written by Luke Barnes, and directed by Jimmy Fairhurst, of the perennial pantomime favourite. But that’s where the similarities end. In this decidedly grown up interpretation, Barnes has chosen to keep only the barest outline of the story, and ditch the magic. So Cinders is a charmingly downtrodden barmaid struggling to keep her dead father’s pub afloat. She is assisted in her endeavours by her best friend Mike, a nod to the fairy godmother role in the original story, but here a working man’s silver lamé wannabe drag queen who MC’s the music. Her evil stepmother, named Judy Garland here, and her two brash stepsisters, Simone and Garfunkel, leach off the labours of the pub workers, and dream of turning a tidy profit from a gastro pub instead. There is a Prince Charming, but he is a “fit” young man with his own ideas about how to exploit his “princess”. And Buttons is a neglected dog with thoughts of
suicide. Poor Cinderella, however is she going to extricate herself from this working class nightmare, and live happily ever after?

There are a lot of good performances in this production, although the singing, with the exception of Lizzie Hopley channeling the divine Judy, is for the most part uninspired. But what the cast lack in musical big moments, they more than make up for in spot on northern accents, comic shtick and spirited interaction with the audience. Patrick Knowles, as Buttons the dog, is a wonderful comic talent who keeps the action from sagging into gloomy exposition as he sprints around the house doing his best to avoid the inevitable bath. Cinders’ sisters, the inexplicably named Simone and Garfunkel, and played here by Louise Haggerty and Megan Pemberton, provide just the right amount of nastiness mixed in with hilarious turns as divas in training. These sisters may be terrible husband hunters, but Haggerty and Pemberton are particularly good at finding audience members willing to go along with their backchat and banter. And Jimmy Fairhurst, as the aforementioned Mike, holds it all together as he schemes to get Cinders to the party in a suitable dress. It’s really only Rosa Coduri, as Cinderella, dressed in jeans and an ugly Christmas sweater (why?) and Jack Condon, as Prince Charming, who struggle in poorly adapted roles. Coduri comes into her own at the end of the show, however, when she sends the upwardly mobile Charming packing, and decides that running the pub with her friends (and her dog) is the happy ending she’s been looking for.

For theatre goers who prefer their pantos traditional, with lots of magic and outrageously pretty costumes, Barnes’ adaptation of Cinderella will come up short. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to enjoy all the good humoured larking about in this production. And if you stick around after the show you will have the opportunity to get stuck into some serious karaoke.

Reviewed by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Geraint Lewis

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

The Vaults

Reviewed – 28th November 2019

★★★

“it is impossible not to enjoy all the good humoured larking about in this production”

Reviewed by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Geraint Lewis

Cinderella

The Vaults until 12th January

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue:

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