It is no insult to say that it is difficult to think of Caryl Churchill without also thinking of Margaret Thatcher, or at least of “Thatcher's Britain.” Top Girls (1982) and Serious Money (1987) are among the most dynamic portraits of that fast-moving, fractious decade. Serious Money in particular is a dark satire on what Churchill describes as the “appalling and exciting world” of the London Stock Exchange. The dramatist clearly doesn't approve of the trading floor, but she is nonetheless sufficiently seduced by its madcap energy—it is both appalling and exciting—for one occasionally to suspect that Churchill is, as Blake said of Milton, “of the devil's party without knowing it.”

Mrs Thatcher has been out of power for ten years now, and Churchill's new play [Far Away] comes stripped of a precise political context. The title suggests that it happens “far away” in time and place, although a heavy irony is intended here, since, horrors apart, the world depicted on stage is recognizably enough our own. The action begins as the forecurtain, which is painted with a peaceful rural scene, rises to reveal a middle-aged woman, Harper, knitting in a chair. A young girl, Joan, enters in her nightie; she has only just arrived in this seeming rural paradise and cannot sleep. But it is not simply the unfamiliarity of her surroundings that is keeping her from slumber—she has just seen something nasty in the woodshed. Though her aunt at first tries to persuade her otherwise, this is no mere childish fantasy; Joan has seen her uncle beating one of the men who arrived in “the lorry.” Harper explains that this must have been a “traitor,” for her uncle helps people flee oppression—Joan should be proud to know that she is “part of a big movement now to make things better.”

The scene changes and Joan, now a simpering maiden, is working in a hatmaking factory. The bench next to hers is occupied by Todd, who like her creates hats for the mysterious “parades.” He alludes to the “trials” and the corruption of the bosses, while Joan pursues her millinery inspiration, a preposterously baroque affair that wouldn't look out of place in an Alexander McQueen fashion show, although it is actually destined for the head of a prisoner on his way to execution.

Admiration shines in Joan's eyes when Todd says he is going to confront the nameless powers that be, but, in the third act, it is Joan herself who has become the activist. Todd and Harper are debating whether she was right to leave the “war” to visit him. The cause of the fighting is not explained, although it is clear that the French and Koreans, not to mention Latvian dentists, Portuguese car salesmen, ants, mallards and the river, have all taken sides. Joan enters and describes briefly the horrors of her cross-country journey, before the curtain drops with a resounding thud and the audience are returned to their initial vision of an idealized bucolic landscape.

Far Away may serve future generations as a classic example of a play with final-act problems, if “act” isn't a bit grand to describe the divisions in a piece that only lasts fifty minutes in total. It is a baffling climax; if the first two parts manage to convince, that is because, despite their surreal flourishes, they are rooted in recognizably universal experiences—a child's nightmare, first love—whereas the third act's vision of global apocalypse seems merely arbitrary, and not a...