Escaped Alone and What If If Only review – Caryl Churchill's double whammy of dazzling dread

The Guardian

13-02-2025

Last month, wildfires ravaged southern California, President Trump issued executive orders on gender diversity and Storm Éowyn brought 100mph winds to the UK. Could any play be more timely than Caryl Churchill's Escaped Alone, with its apocalyptic visions of raging fires, a God who punishes gender dysphoria and a wind that 'turned heads inside out'?
First seen in 2016, this startling chamber piece juxtaposes the inconsequential chitchat of four retired women with alarming descriptions of planetary destruction. Structured like a string quartet in which fluttering exchanges alternate with soulful solos, it is sometimes a leisurely free association, ranging from antiques to cats, soap opera to superpowers, and sometimes a terrifying catalogue of rising waters, miscarriages and societal collapse.
In Sarah Frankcom's crisp, ethereal production, Maureen Beattie is cast as a gnomic outsider. In the part of Mrs Jarrett, she shuffles on stage with a shopping trolley, hair matted, head stooped, at once friends with the other three women and detached. Her clothes are more dowdy, her posture more tense. Even her Glasgow accent (mocked by Annette Badland's Vi) sets her apart in this English company. She frowns as if struggling to keep up with an alien language. She stands, hands clasped, while the others sit.
And it is Mrs Jarrett, like a seer, who switches into the bleakest of monologues, as if unable to reconcile the banality of the back-garden chat with the enormity of the environmental threat. Beattie performs the dark poetry with trance-like intensity.
But the rest is not entirely inane. Churchill is too subtle a writer for that. In the assured hands of Badland, Souad Faress and Margot Leicester, the conversation confounds, surprises and amuses, even as it spirals in its own direction. There are dark corners here too.
After the interval, the playwright again addresses our sense of powerlessness in the short and stimulating What If If Only (first seen in 2021) in which Danielle Henry plays a young woman facing up to the 'ghost of a future that never happened'. On a stage filled with possible futures, including one promising 'equality and cake', she can, like theatre itself, only ever live in the moment.
At the Royal Exchange theatre, Manchester, until 8 March