Caryl Churchill’s new play Escaped Alone begins in the most ordinary way - Mrs Jarrett, a nosey neighbour peers through a garden gate and sees three retired women she has seen before sitting on a sunny day, enjoying some tea. They invite her in. They chit-chat. But this is a Caryl Churchill play, it’s never going to be that simple.The dialogue is minimalist, unfinished thoughts that collide quickly with each other. It takes a while to tune into this style and follow the topics the foursome zip between. From the changing high street and old money to TV soap plots and even touching upon quantum physics, drones and new technology, ‘whole worlds in your pocket’. The conversation is knowingly nostalgic, yet somehow subversive, uneasy, interesting ideas touched upon but not discussed.
The acting is uniformly excellent and the characters are finely drawn, all female and all well beyond middle age, a subversive act in itself. They feel familiar and lived in but these woman are far from the stereotypical old dears. We are in middle class Sally’s well tended garden. She worked in Medicine, is all easy charm and eager for everyone to get on. Timid Lena sits like a fragile leaf and offers her words apologetically. She tends to not get out much now retired, would like to go to Japan, but should try to ‘get to Tescos first’ the others tease. Ex hairdresser Vi has a sharp tongue and isn’t afraid to say what she thinks, she has a dark secret! Meanwhile Mrs J, the outsider, interjects in a chatty matter of fact way.
The acting is uniformly excellent and the characters are finely drawn
This sun drenched scene of afternoon tea and talk is then shattered by a blackout. A blazing crackling electric coil of light surrounds the proscenium arch and Mrs J steps into another world. A post apocalyptic world of catastrophe and foreboding. During the play this world is visited numerous times, each with a monologue detailing a very modern end of days scenario. Buried beneath earth, hunger, fire, floods, wind, sickness - each biblical in their proportions but with very modern absurdist twists. The hunger began we are told when eighty percent of food was diverted to tv programmes, ‘Smartphones were distributed by charities when rice ran out, so the dying could watch cooking’. The imagery is vivid, shocking, satirical and yet all the more affecting because it describes the fadish flawed world we live in.
As soon as we enter this new world, we are back suburbia, back to the hum drum. But is all as it seems? Each of the women is afforded their own monologue revealing a private catastrophe of their own. Sally’s extreme phobia of cats, Lena’s deeply affecting speech on loneliness and depression, Vi’s visceral reaction to being in a kitchen, the scene of her crime. While Mrs J’s own soliloquy is a disturbing growl of rage repeating the same words over and over again.
At 50 minutes, Churchill manages to pack in more ideas and revealing moments of humanity than some films manage in a trilogy! The personal and everyday juxtapose violently with the global and apocalyptic. Yes it is challenging, you are trusted to connect your own dots. But like a large firework that explodes leaving something rather beautiful, those images will live with me for a long time.
Nell Gwynn, the famous mistress of King Charles II has recently become a favourite historical figure.