Joanna Bowman’s blistering production of Caryl Churchill’s 2016 play Escaped Alone offers a reality-bending look into the garden tea party of three women: Lena (Annie Kidd), Vi (Irene Macdougall), and Sally (Joanna Tope). They are joined by a peculiar neighbour, Mrs. Jarrett (Blythe Duff), who comes speaking in prophecies – or perhaps of memories – of apocalyptic doom.
Escaped Alone is not a play that offers simple answers, and Bowman leans into this ambiguity unflinchingly. Mrs. Jarrett’s descriptions of various apocalyptic events – flood, famine, and climate crisis included – are heralded by jarring and evocative lighting, sound, and video design (designed by Colin Grenfell, Susan Bear, and Lewis den Hertog, respectively). These dizzying visuals – flickering white lights, loud pops and bangs of sound, and a giant screen playing videos of extreme close-up shots of plants and soil – evoked reactions from audience members, causing people to wince and flinch, and worked to smash through any comfort offered by naturalistic, linear, or unambiguous storytelling.
This production flourishes during its monologues, both in its apocalyptic tirades and in its insights into the minds of its four characters; this is where the acting, directing, and writing are allowed to shine their brightest. A particular highlight of the production is Sally’s explanation of her near-debilitating fear of cats. But while these monologues may, at times, play with the absurd, they offer a glimpse into the isolating loneliness of suburban sensibilities which prevent the women from managing to ever be fully open with each other about their fears, their feelings, or their terrible rage. Sat in four separate chairs, always just out of each other’s reach, when a character monologues and the lights fade out, they appear to be truly alone in the world of the play.
But what is most striking about this 2024 production of Churchill’s Escaped Alone is how the once absurd events described by Mrs. Jarrett no longer seem quite so strange. Descriptions of rocks aimed to target specific civilians’ houses and NHS-funded gas masks feel less bizarre and more wryly familiar to an audience in the 2020s, and as the world we live in grows more and more absurd, it would seem that Churchill’s own Doomsday visions of the world are hauntingly accurate.
‘Escaped Alone’ is playing at the Tron Theatre from 22nd February – 9th March 2024
[Grace Murray, they/them]
[Instagram: @gracefrom._space]
Image credit: https://www.tron.co.uk/shows/escaped-alone/ by Mihaela Bodlovic
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