Set and Costume Design (2026)
Play: Far Away by Caryl Churchill (2000)
Designed for the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, London.
Far Away follows Joan, whose life unfolds across three unsettling acts in a world where violence becomes increasingly normalised.
As a child, Joan witnesses something disturbing in her aunt Harper’s house: her uncle appears to be involved in the brutal killing of people brought in by truck at night. When Joan questions what she has seen, Harper reassures her with ambiguous explanations, blurring the line between truth and denial.
As a young adult, Joan works in a hat factory with Todd, where they design elaborate hats for prisoners who are paraded before execution. The violence is now institutionalised and aestheticised - turned into spectacle.
By the final act, the world has descended into total chaos. War has spread everywhere, and even nature itself has taken sides: animals, weather, and landscapes are all at war. Joan prepares to join the fighting, suggesting that no one and nothing remains neutral.
The play traces how violence shifts from hidden and denied, to normalised, to completely all-encompassing, creating a world where reality itself feels unstable and frightening.
My design follows this sense of oppression, unease and apocalyptic sense of the play. For Act 1, I placed Harper as a delapidated and gross American Motel owner, in this world where everything is left to rot. Harper portrays this strict, intimidating old lady that doesn’t carry an ounce of care for Joan, who is just a scared little girl.
Act 1
Act 2
In act 2, Joan has grown up into a young woman, and she is now fabricating hats with Todd, a young man. I imagined this hat workshop following the logic i had for act 1: a delapidated place, turned into a ‘home’. I imagined this industrial setting, with this massive fan looming behind our characters as they make their extravagant hats. The violence appears at the end of this act, where the prisoners parade and the best hat is the only one who survives.
Act 3
To wrap up the play, we are back in Harper’s motel, in the kitchen this time. Harper and Todd are waiting for Joan to wake up from her long adventure of walking back home. When she does, she delivers a beautiful monologue about how everything and everyone picked a side in the war and she herself doesn’t even know which is which.
Storyboard
Ground Plan
Section