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Irish Independent
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Acting greats shine in an aperitif of a play that leaves you hungry
Escaped Alone is set in a garden where Sally, Vi and Lena, three like-minded retired woman, are shooting the breeze on patio chairs. The conversation has the informal shorthand quality of people who know each other well. Non sequiturs tumble out giving the chat a disjointed, Beckettian feel. They are joined by Mrs Jarrett, a little different to them, a little other-worldly, scruffier in her dress and witchy in her demeanour.
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
New York Times
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Caryl Churchill Times Four Makes an Infinity of Worlds
A girl made of glass. A god — or, really, all of them. Ghosts, but of the future. An imp who may be trapped in a bottle. Just another day in Caryl Churchill's world. The arrival of new work by Churchill is like the arrival of a new theorem in a supposedly settled body of knowledge. 'Cloud Nine' (1979) explored gender as colonialism; 'Escaped Alone' (2016) domesticated the apocalypse. 'Drunk Enough to Say I Love You' (2006) reframed the alliance of Britain and the United States as a sloppy date. Clones and multiverses are part of her world. With a mathematician's precision, she posits ways of thinking about the universe and its inhabitants that, even when baffling, give more dimension to our experience of both. Her latest investigations take the form of a collection of four one-act plays at the Public Theater, under the portmanteau title 'Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.' Written separately over the last few years, each is pointed enough on its own: short and edgy. But together, in a splendid and surprisingly emotional production directed by James Macdonald, a frequent Churchill collaborator, they are so sharp you hardly feel them slicing your skin. 'Glass' is the most literally shattering. The life of a girl made of the substance, who lives on a mantelpiece for safety, is encompassed in 13 minutes. Her mother frets over her, her brother brags about her, her mantelpiece neighbors — an old clock, a plastic dog, a painted vase — compete with her. (She may be pretty, the clock says, but he's useful.) Soon the girl (Ayana Workman) meets a flesh-and-blood boy (Japhet Balaban) who is entranced by the transparency of her feelings: He can see straight into them, with no need for words. When his own feelings are spoken, in the form of whispers we do not hear, the express bus to tragedy departs. The way intimacy opens to loss is a theme here; the way abstractions become characters is a miracle. Somehow, it takes just a moment to adjust to the bizarre setup and the ensuing complications. (The mother warns that if the girl goes out for a walk with the boy, she had better wear Bubble Wrap.) Nor do we trouble ourselves that the production makes no attempt to literalize the figurines. They're just us. Likewise just us: the gods represented by one actor in 'Kill.' I say one actor, but Deirdre O'Connell is so singular, she's plural. On a puffy white cloud (sets by Miriam Buether), in a cream and gold chenille lamé suit (costumes by Enver Chakartash), she looks down on the ancient parade of human viciousness with amusement and despair and every feeling in between. Not many actors could parse — let alone make both funny and awful — a maniacal, 12-minute monologue that's basically a mixed grill of Greek and Roman sagas. A typical, barely punctuated sample: 'She's committed to being her husband's enemy taking his longtime enemy as her lover, her husband's cousin who wants all that family dead, she's his enemy as soon as he kills their daughter cutting her throat on the altar to get wind for sailing to his brother's war' — on it goes through a thousand horrid demises. Bring a classicist with you to sort out the sources, though it doesn't matter. To the gods, it's all gossip, delivered by O'Connell in the manner of a Southern barfly facing last call. Representing the divine as a debauchee is a brilliant choice, demonstrating a key Churchillian theme: All evil is human evil. 'It's not our fault,' O'Connell says at one point, voicing the gods. 'We don't exist.' The human need to fabricate other worlds and blame ours upon them is also the subject of the third play, 'What If If Only.' A man (Sathya Sridharan) so mourns the loss of his wife that he opens a metaphysical door to an afterlife. But the being who then enters isn't in fact his wife; she's a ghost of 'the dead future,' one of the innumerable possibilities of who she might have become. All the man must do to revive her, the being explains, is 'make me happen' — but, he wails, he doesn't know how. I say he and she for the mourner and the mourned, because that's how this production has cast them, but Churchill doesn't specify. (In the play's online premiere, the mourner was female and her late spouse male.) The story doesn't care about that; it cares about the larger truth that anyone who has suffered a great loss, which is to say everyone, will understand immediately: We can't get them back. There are only more-or-less unwanted substitute futures, suggested in a swishing soundscape of voices designed by Bray Poor. Surely it's no coincidence that the play appeared shortly after Churchill's husband of 60 years, the lawyer David Harter, died in 2021. 'Glass,' 'Kill' and 'What If If Only' make up the first half of the Public's program, along with two charming intermezzos: an acrobat (Junru Wang) performing hand balancing maneuvers on tiny podiums called canes; and a juggler (Maddox Morfit-Tighe) executing flourishes, spins and traps with clubs. In front of a gold proscenium with flashing chasers (lighting by Isabella Byrd), these acts suggest a kind of vaudeville, so fitting for Churchill's evolving take on tragedy as comedy, and vice versa. After an intermission, that thought is further revised in 'Imp.' Two 60-ish cousins, but not the kissing kind, share an apartment somewhere in England. Dot (O'Connell) has unspecified back problems that keep her in her easy chair. Jimmy (John Ellison Conlee) has ambitions toward fitness but sneakers not quite up to the task. Into their pleasantly carping ménage come two newcomers: their niece, Niamh (pronounced 'neeve'), from Ireland, and Rob, a local homeless man. I have not seen a Churchill work in the naturalistic domestic dramedy vein before, and it's fascinating. In 12 swift scenes that take up an hour, she easily achieves the plot density of premium cable, with its regular revelations, its ruptures and reunions. Niamh (Adelind Horan) and Rob (Balaban) begin a relationship that worries Dot and pleases Jimmy. Things progress and devolve in a broadly satisfying, almost familiar way. What makes this pure, strange Churchill is off to the side. It's that bottle, near Dot's chair, which she keeps as a kind of talisman or threat. Is there really something in it? What if it got out? Does it (as Dot claims) grant wishes, especially evil ones? Or is Dot, with her sharp tongue and tendency toward havoc, herself the imp? These questions, always physically present onstage, derange the domestic dramedy and get at the heart of Churchill's worldview. There is always something in the bottle. It did get out. Wishes, especially evil ones, are granted. Yes, Dot is the imp, and so are we all.
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Escaped Alone and What If If Only review – a dislocating Caryl Churchill evening of two halves
Escaped Alone (2016) is first in this double bill of short plays by the veteran dramatist Caryl Churchill, directed by Sarah Frankcom, the Royal Exchange's former artistic director. Three women occupy chairs on a square of grass; Churchill's text states they are 'at least 70'. A fourth woman (similar age) introduces the action: 'I'm walking down the street…' Seeing the others, she enters the garden and is greeted as Mrs Jarrett. At the close of the play, Mrs Jarrett leaves the others as she found them and, walking out through the auditorium, tells us: 'And then I said thanks for the tea and went home.' In between, the four pass the time chasing conversation topics, jibing, sharing memories, singing a song from their youth. Their disjointed dialogue feels stage-artificial, lacking the character-revealing crafting of close observers of suburban life (Alans Ayckbourn and Bennett, or Victoria Wood, for instance). The characters' inner selves are presented in monologues that offer cliches of older women. Two are fearful (cats, open spaces; Margot Leicester and Souad Faress, respectively), one is haunted by memories (of a dark deed – moving writing powerfully delivered by Annette Badland). Mrs Jarrett is of the 'doomed, we're all doomed' type (Maureen Beattie, deploying broad Scots to effect); her seven solos deliver verbal visions of dystopian apocalypse that sound like schlock-to-the-max blockbusters (backed by a rumbling soundscape from Nicola T Chang). The pleasure of the 55-minute performance lies in the acting. What If If Only (2021), at about 30 minutes, is more interesting and more emotionally engaging, centring on the grief of an individual following the death of their partner. A young woman (Danielle Henry) enters a sitting room strewn with books, records, pamphlets (revealed in a coup de théâtre by designer Rose Revitt, not to be spoiled by description). She looks through a box of photographs, talks to an empty chair – not empty to her, who sees in memory the lover who has died. She is visited by the ghosts of futures that might have been, the personifications of 'what if, if only' possibilities. First, and most insistent, is self-proclaimed 'brilliant future' (Badland), followed by a crowd of clamouring Futures (excellent community cast). Having shaken them off, she is confronted by the Present (Lamin Touray), who introduces her to, and invites her to choose, Child Future (Bea Glancy – wickedly vivid and a talent to watch). At the end, as at the beginning, the mourner looks through photos and talks to the empty space in the chair. Externally, nothing is different; yet this well-crafted, life-opening drama, beautifully directed and performed, has subtly changed us all. Star ratings (out of five) Escaped Alone ★★★ What If If Only ★★★★ Escaped Alone and What If If Only are at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 8 March
