I was reading a Salman Rushdie column the other day and, not for the first time, agreeing with ninety-five percent of it. In fact, I agree with him so often these days I’ve almost stopped noticing it. But not quite: far away at the back of my mind, I still remember the Rushdie of the 1980s—reflexively leftist, anti-Thatcher, the works. The old line about the liberal mugged by reality goes tenfold for him: he’s a liberal whom reality has spent the last thirteen years trying to kill. I still have difficulties with his novels, not least the one that got him into all the trouble, but in his columns and essays at least he has no illusions.

I wonder, though, how he feels about his chums, the old comrades from the BBC arts shows and left-wing salons. Comparatively few liberals get mugged by reality, and among the grand panjandrums of the arts it’s rarer still. At the theater, indeed, one often feels mugged by unreality, by strange hazy visions utterly disconnected from human experience. One such is currently one of the hottest tickets in town: Far Away, by Caryl Churchill at the New York Theatre Workshop. First seen at the Royal Court in London two years ago, it’s a short play—fifty-three minutes for fifty-five bucks—which nevertheless manages to fit in three “acts” of increasingly ludicrous dystopianism. Is Miss Churchill the first absurdist with ADHD? Or is she testing the cravenness of the critics? The flightier and sillier