Interpreting Plays: Fen and Far Away by Caryl Churchill

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A double bill of plays by Caryl Churchill, presented by second year Theatre Performance students at the Department if Theatre, University of Bristol

Fen

Caryl Churchill's Fen is a play deeply rooted in its setting. Inspired by verbatim snippets collected from a cast research trip to the Fenlands in the early 1980s, the play explores a distinct landscape and the people that live and are trapped there. Typical of Churchill's style there is political discourse threaded through the piece as we question the impacts of Thatcherite repression of people tied to modes of work. As we reveal these characters, we hope you get a sense of their individual methods of coping but also their collective and cyclical pain that has passed down through generations, illuminating the exploitation that still goes on in many industries today.

Far Away

In a timeless exploration of innocence to war, Far Away is a play where all of the world turns on one another and nothing can be trusted - where what is hidden behind the shadows slowly reveals its self. As a play of tension, family ties and conflict we get to watch Joan grow up through segments in her life and how she goes about dealing with the world around her. We meet Joan in her new guardian’s home, her aunt Harper’s, and her first exposure to suffering which send us into Act 2 where we meet Tod and the corrupt world of working in a hat factory parallel to the lives of prisoners then into the final act revealing the true nature of the world and the abstract reality of war.