Love London Love Culture rounds up the reviews for the Donmar’s revival of Caryl Churchill’s play.
Time Out: **** “The highest praise you can say about this production is that Turner has made the play work – she hasn’t so much interpreted ‘Far Away’ as summoned it from the plane of Churchill’s imagination.”
Culture Whisper: **** “Far Away is chilling and darkly funny in equal measure, the humour offsetting the bleak, stark reality of Churchill’s dystopian world.”
The Stage: **** “Churchill’s play interlaces the bucolic, the fantastical and the harrowing, pairing characteristic economy with wild, imaginative flourishes. She makes potent use of juxtaposition and omission.”
WhatsOnStage: **** “It’s a tiny play, but an immense one. Chilling and thought-provoking. The evening may be short, but you couldn’t watch anything else. It’s already too much.”
The Guardian: *** “The production is only 45 minutes long and the words, and silences, could do with more time to land. It’s only in the dying moments, when a dazed Joan describes the chaos outside, that the play truly unsettles. Sitting quietly in the shadows, the audience shivers.”
The Telegraph: **** “But seeing Lyndsey Turner’s restrained, rigorous revival 20 years later, it feels like Churchill’s warning is inching closer to the truth. Our greatest female playwright is not a lunatic but quite possibly a soothsayer.”
Evening Standard: **** “The black humour of Churchill’s writing is sometimes missing, but otherwise Turner’s production is a strong match for the playwright’s wild imagination, with sound from Christopher Shutt that makes the walls vibrate, and glorious visuals from Lizzie Clachlan.”
The Spy in the Stalls: ** 1/2 “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.”
Reviewsgate.com: **** “The world it seems is at war – everything in it, humans, animals and nature itself is battling with everything else. It is a chilling thought-provoking vision and gets the production it deserves.”
The Upcoming: **** “Far Away is pretty much perfect on the page, leaving directors and designers a relatively narrow band to work with in order to deliver the precision required. Lyndsey Turner and Lizzie Clachan nail it, giving the production an air of ominous restraint – until it momentarily explodes, the curtain pulled away.”
Far Away continues to play at the Donmar Warehouse until the 4th April.