11 February 2020. Far Away at the Donmar

This Caryl Churchill play certainly forces the audience to puzzle out what exactly is going on. It starts out fairly straightforwardly with a child coming downstairs in the middle of the night to her Aunt and telling her about the scene of violence she has witnessed outside in the farmyard. We surmise she is staying with the Aunt and Uncle to escape a war going on. She is sworn to secrecy by the Aunt and we move with an enormous jolt to the next scene. Here we are in a workshop with two people making hats - a man and a woman. The woman is new to it and we are left wondering is this the girl grown up? They are very elaborate/ theatrical, Ascot-like hats and we see their two creations in various stages of assembly. Next we switch to the most arresting scene of the evening - a parade of prisoners in prison garb but also wearing hats, including the two we have seen being made. This is an extraordinary scene, with a concentration camp resonance to it. The prisoners are arrayed on a dual-layered platform before, we learn, being burned with their hats - except for the winning hat which goes to a museum. This time the winner is the creation of the woman in the workshop.
We then switch scenes again completely and have two woman and a man (query aunt, niece and uncle) discussing the progress of the world at war in which animal species and objects of nature (rivers etc) have taken sides (the elephants are with the Dutch). It is on this surreal note that the play, seemingly abruptly, ends. As usual, some in the audience start clapping before drawing breath, which is a shame because I felt it needed a pause to collect one's thoughts. Anyway, the acting was excellent and deserved more whole-hearted applause than it got from an audience somewhat puzzled and shocked. Equally, the direction by Lyndsey Turner and particularly the design by Lizzie Clachan made this a 45 minutes to remember. It had an Orwellian quality to it and transported us to a world where humans were still living their lives but against an extraordinary backdrop of war. Or, that's what I thought.