ABSTRACT
Caryl Churchill’s play Far Away takes the nal of its many disorienting turns when a character blandly declares, “The cats have come in on the side of the French” (35). The concluding scene of the play is a shocking elaboration of the possibility this line contains: the possibility that the politics of division and aggression that have dened human history for so long will nally infect the non-human world as well. In the world that results, animals enter into alliances with human groups, themselves now bizarrely divided along postnational lines: “Portuguese car salesmen. Russian swimmers. Thai butchers. Latvian dentists” (36-37). Conict has become the dening feature of society, the rule rather than the exception. New reasons for hatred and new opportunities for alliance abound: “Mallards are not a good waterbird. They commit rape, and they’re on the side of the elephants and the Koreans. But crocodiles are always in the wrong” (39). In Far Away, Shakespeare’s “universal wolf” seems to be on the prowl. All creation partakes of division, discord, and violence. Even the weather “is on the side of the Japanese,” and “we are burning the grass that wouldn’t serve” (43).
