Caryl Churchill has furthered feminist performance theory, in the last twenty years, and broadened traditional views of gender roles through her script writing. For example, her plays Cloud Nine and Top Girls defy traditional convention, with Cloud Nine’s cross-gender casting and Top Girl’s pro-Thatcherite ethos as its foundation. Churchill has affected the acting and production process in the way she has written her scripts, such as the mentioned pieces, and the way in which theatre is performed.“Her work is heavily influenced by the practices of experimentaland physical theatre: not one to make it easy for an audience, she prefers to tell a tale in a challenging, sometimes meandering way.” The language in Far Away appears very normal within the context of the piece, though the subject of the book is something that most audiences would either not understand or be disgusted by.“… and in fact I killed two cats and a child under five so itwasn’t that different from a mission.” – Joan Churchill’s script, for Far Away, can be seen to turn our present day society into a collection of barbarous individuals, sparing no exception to the animal kingdom and Mother Nature. One could see this as Churchill’s own portrayal of the War of the Worlds. Joan shows concern regarding where the loyalties of the nearby river lies. This could be seen as quite an absurd gesture, however falls into place within the Daniel MoscovitchCaryl Churchill2context of the piece and the society in which the characters are living in. Everything on planet Earth is at war with one another. Churchill’s post modern script can be seen to affect the acting and production process by the way in which it transforms the actors into characters, that are unrelated to present day society, who far more in touch with their primordial instinct of ‘survival of the fittest’ in this unimaginable...
