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Irish Examiner
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Theatre review: Escaped Alone questions our assumptions about older women
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
Irish Times
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
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. READ MORE 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
