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Escaped Alone review: Four women, catastrophe and the comforts of ordinary chatter
Escaped Alone
Everyman, Cork
★★★★☆
It begins innocuously enough: four old women sit in a sunlit garden on plastic chairs, chatting. But something is off. The sky is an unnaturally vivid blue, and the sun – outlined in black like a child's crayon drawing – resembles an eye, glaring down at them.
Even the conversation feels disjointed. The women bicker, speculate about TV plots, affirm and contradict each other. The rhythms of their speech are recognisably natural yet pushed just beyond believability: unmoored, associative, faintly surreal.
This is Escaped Alone, Caryl Churchill's dark, cracklingly funny play about catastrophe, denial and the comforts of ordinary chatter. Directed by Annabelle Comyn for
Hatch Theatre Company
, this compact, unsettling production runs to just 50 minutes but sets off some big themes.
The women's garden talk unspools loosely, interrupted by sudden tonal shifts as Mrs Jarrett (a spellbinding Anna Healy) steps forward into stormy lighting to deliver visions of the apocalypse. It's never clear whether she's describing an alternate reality or if these horrors have already occurred in the world the women inhabit. Perhaps they are stuck in some psychic limbo, condemned to small-talk as the real world collapses on a loop.
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Churchill's writing in these end-time monologues is admirable in its grotesque intricacy. People are driven underground and trade mushrooms for urine. Some lose sexual desire entirely while others become feral, copulating with anything they encounter. The obese sell slices of themselves until hunger forces them to eat their own rashers. NHS-issued gas masks come with a three-month waiting list, or can be bought privately in a range of fashionable colours. Rivers run backwards. Floods, fires and shape-shifting viruses spread. Written in 2016, the text has some eerily prophetic details.
As the play progresses, the boundary between the women's idle talk and Jarrett's dystopias begins to dissolve. The minimalist set becomes increasingly charged. The sky darkens. The tree rattles. The cartoon sun mutates into a black pupil, rolling around a red eye. Personal and planetary crises overlap, intensifying the ambient paranoia. Casual lines echo with menace. 'This time of year the shadow comes up earlier,' one says.
Each woman delivers a vivid, tragicomic monologue about her private suffering: Sally (Sorcha Cusack) describes her pathological fear of cats; Vi (Ruth McCabe) confesses to stabbing her abusive husband; Lena (Deirdre Monaghan) speaks of a growing silence overtaking her thoughts.
And yet, amid the doom, there is laughter. The women genuinely enjoy one another's company. They're funny. They've seen a lot. They even have a little boogie.
Comyn's restrained, intelligent direction allows Churchill's extraordinary script to take centre stage. The performances are sharp and tightly controlled, the design minimal but suggestive. The fragmented, intensely poetic script shows its debt to the modernists (particularly Samuel Beckett and his dementia dramas), but its anxious atmosphere feels uniquely contemporary.
Intersecting crises mount and grow out of control; horrors fester and mutate in the imagination. Yet the play is not nihilistic. Even at the end of the world, Churchill suggests, there may still be a garden somewhere where women sit, and talk, and keep each other company.
Escaped Alone is at the
Everyman
, as part of
Cork Midsummer Festival
, until Saturday, June 14th, then at
Project Arts Centre
, Dublin, from Friday, June 20th, until Saturday, June 28th, with a preview on Thursday, June 19th
