Theatre review: Escaped Alone questions our assumptions about older women

Irish Examiner

9 hours ago

Escaped Alone, Everyman, Cork Midsummer Festival, ★★★★☆
Escaped Alone is a short, sharp shock of a play from British playwright Caryl Churchill, one of the finest dramatists at work today. There is also a wealth of female talent deployed, both on stage and off, in this Irish premiere, staged by Hatch Theatre Company and the Everyman Theatre, in association with Once Off Productions, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival.
Three older women — Sally (Sorcha Cusack), Vi (Ruth McCabe), and Lena (Deirdre Monaghan)— sit companionably in a garden setting but the signifiers are queasily hyperreal in their foreshadowing — the grass is plastic, the tree appears to wither as the action progresses and the sun burns with an intense fury. They are joined by Mrs Jarrett (Anna Healy) who wanders in from the side aisle of the theatre, already marked as an outsider.
Ruth McCabe, Sorcha Cusack, Deirdre Monaghan, and Anna Healy in a scene from Escaped Alone. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
Initially, the women chat about the topics that lubricate our everyday social interactions — relatives, TV shows, shopping — but their dry and often funny observations, paired with successive interior monologues, are anything but anodyne. They talk over and interrupt each other but beneath the passive aggressive swipes there is also love, connection and the bonding of a shared past.
Mrs Jarrett — an unlikely Cassandra dressed in leggings, hoodie, socks and sandals — breaks off intermittently to deliver a litany of apocalyptic scenarios which, unfortunately, are not that dystopian. For a play that was first performed almost a decade ago, these have a startling immediacy, and a deadpan Healy leans into the comic bleakness of it all, making the audience, in its laughter, complicit in the looming catastrophe.
Anna Healy in Escaped Alone. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
Churchill, thankfully, is not out to impart any lessons in her work; there are no easy epiphanies here. But she does lead us to question our assumptions — especially the ones we make about older women whose interior lives, now more than ever, usually hold no interest in a world where appearance counts for everything.
Annabelle Comyn's direction is assured and while the individual performances are excellent, the cast doesn't quite seem to gel as a whole, which may in part be down to the elliptical script and dialogue. As Mrs Jarrett says thanks for the tea and heads home, the buzz of animated discussion afterwards shows the power of work that nudges audiences out of their comfort zone, where some of the best theatre resides.
Escaped Alone is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, June 19-28