It sounds as if she has espied a bloody act of ethnic cleansing the older woman stonewalls unctuously. In the first, Joan, a young girl who can’t get to sleep, is quizzing her aunt about what she has just accidentally witnessed. It unfolds in three episodes that shelve steeply. Far Away is a twisted fairy tale that demonstrates her matchless gift for merging the apocalyptic and the fantastical. Today, at the age of 80, the British playwright continues startlingly to reinvent herself. Caryl Churchill has been called the Picasso of modern playwrights.