Writer: Caryl Churchill
Director: Rebecca McCutcheon
This production by Lost Text/Found Space must be the most ambitious of Camden Fringe 2025. Taking Carly Churchill’s apocalyptic play and placing it in a warehouse setting, lit with eerie shadows and filled with strange sounds, the theatre company take an audience into a dark, but absurd world.
We are ushered into the vast space underneath the University of Westminster on Baker Street with a whistle from a man in fatigues. Looking out from a gallery, we see a young girl running excitedly through a line of pylons. We are then led downstairs to another space, smelling the acrid scent of fresh soil as we walk, where a living room has been constructed. We watch the scene through net curtains like Peeping Toms.
Far Away is an odd play, but so distinctly Churchill. It was first performed at the Royal Court in 2000, directed by Stephen Daldry. Somewhere in the countryside, a girl discovers that her uncle is keeping people in lorries, and outside the shed is a pool of fresh blood. She doesn’t believe, as her aunt tells her, that the blood comes from a new dog that was run over earlier in the day. She’s heard screaming, too, but she’s told it’s the shrieking of an owl. In 2025, it’s impossible not to wonder if her uncle is a people-smuggler.
For Scene Two, we find ourselves back up in the gallery where a couple, one of whom is the girl we’ve just seen, but older, are making hats in a factory. She’s just started the job while he has been there for some years. He’s eager to tell her about the way that the factory is run. He believes that they are being exploited and has plans to tell a journalist. As the hats take form, we are still oblivious to their horrific purpose.
Back downstairs, a conflict is going on, and other productions would find humour in Churchill’s ideas about animals joining forces with warring countries. “The cats have come in on the side of France”, one character tells another. But here, every line is delivered in utter seriousness. The sounds of approaching war or water from the room next door underline the bleakness of the world’s situation.
Lorna Dale, Samuel Gosrani and Lizzie Hopley excel in their performances, with the slither of romance between the milliners finely judged. Jack Hathaway’s lights are inspired, even catching our silhouettes as we march like an army from one space to the next. The hats by Nicola Hewitt-George are wondrous, and Lucy Ann Harrison’s sound design hits all the right notes for such desolation.
It could be argued that Churchill is imagining the future. But it’s more likely she’s representing the present, and director Rebecca McCutcheon leaves us no escape route.
Runs until 23 August 2023
Camden Fringe runs until 24 August 2025
