Far Away

Trade paperback. 8vo. Pp. [xiv], 40, [10 (blank)]. Glossy, pictorial wraps. First staged Upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre in November/December 2000, in a production directed by Stephen Daldry, starring Linda Bassett. The playwright, Nina Raine, acted as assistant director. Originally published as a Paperback Original in 2000, this being the 2001 reprint with corrections for its West End transfer to the Albery Theatre.

A howl of anguish at the increasing – and increasingly accepted – levels of inhumanity in a world seemingly perpetually involved in conflict. Directed with clinical detachment by Daldry, each outlandish explanation by the aunt to the niece's 'bloody' accusations brings to mind Neville Chamberlain's craven dictum of Hitler's 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia as a "a quarrel in a faraway land between people of which we know nothing."

Caryl Churchill is the author of some twenty plays, including Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Serious Money, The Skriker and Blue Heart. "[T]he greatest living English playwright." –Tony Kushner