War Machines and The Theatre of Apocalypse: A Schizoanalytic Reading of Caryl Churchill’s "Far Away"

Keskin E.

III. Theatre and Drama Studies Conference Living on the Edge: Chaos in Theatre, Film and Performance, İstanbul, Türkiye, 5 - 07 Aralık 2025, ss.53, (Özet Bildiri)

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
  • Basıldığı Şehir: İstanbul
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.53
  • İstanbul Kent Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Schizoanalysis reconceives the stage into a machinic assemblage, conceptualizing the unconscious not as a theatre of repressed fantasies but as a factory of desiring-machines. Correspondingly, Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000) stages a fragmented as well as paranoid dystopian theatricality in which the boundaries between order and chaos progressively deterritorialize into apocalyptic confusion. Set in a theatrical spatiality where nature participate in an on-going war of all against all, it could be argued that the play dramatizes a universe in permanent crisis, reflecting both socio-political anxieties and existential precarity.

A Deleuzoguattarian approach to the schizoanalysis focuses on theorization of schizophrenia as both a simultaneous dissolution of social norms and the emergence of generative desire. Within this framework, the play embodies the tension within the oppressive reterritorialization of authoritarian control and the destabilizing lines of flight that fracture meaning, exposing a theatre of apocalypse that simultaneously destabilizes and reimagines political order. Through the prism of schizoanalysis, Far Away can be understood not merely as a dystopian allegory but as a performance of deterritorialization, where identity, morality, and reality themselves collapse into proliferating multiplicities. The play thereby exposes a theatre of apocalypse that destabilizes political order while simultaneously reimagining its alternatives, suggesting that catastrophe is inherently productive.

Through the prism of schizoanalysis, the play’s episodic structure and escalating absurdity enact a schizophrenic dramaturgy, rejecting linear coherence in favor of ruptured perception and unstable worlds. In this sense, the paper situates the play at the intersection of dystopian theatre and Schizoanalytic critique, illuminating how Churchill transforms the stage into a site of apocalyptic revelation. The play reveals the world’s dissolution as both catastrophic and generative where it posits a collapse that simultaneously signals the exhaustion of political structures and the emergence of chaotic possibilities.