When Herman Melville uses the quote, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee,” at the end of Moby Dick, he attributes it to Job. But actually it is spoken by one of Job’s servants, of an attack that has nothing to do with a whale. When legendary UK playwright Caryl Churchill appropriates part of the quote for the title of her doomsday play, the question of escape seems to hang unresolved in the air. Whatever happens to us, she suggests, we won’t get out of it alone.
A writer who has always challenged form and function, who eschews linear plot and character development in favour of the development of ideas, Churchill’s later work represents a distillation and refinement of her craft. This double bill opens with a flat-out masterpiece that runs just under an hour, and if the following play, What If If Only, is the slighter work at only 25 minutes, it stands as a fascinating insight into the processes of one of the world’s most vital and provocative thinkers.
In Escaped Alone, four women over 70 – Mrs Jarrett (Helen Morse), Sally (Deidre Rubenstein), Lena (Kate Hood) and Vi (Debra Lawrance) – sit in a garden and shoot the breeze, discussing their lives, their partners, their children and grandchildren. They talk about television series they’re watching, about the changing nature of the local shops, about their kitchens. There are a lot of ellipses, sentences that arrest midway, doubts and fears that slowly come to the surface.
Then every 10 minutes or so, Mrs Jarrett leaves the garden and comes downstage to deliver a monologue of societal and environmental collapse, one long litany of horrors so prescient and powerful it begins to make the afternoon chats look dangerously avoidant. Churchill unleashes her rhetorical force to devastating satirical effect: “Chemicals spilled through the cracks in the money”, while “Obese people sold off strips of themselves to the highest bidder, and when they got hungry survived on their own rations.”
The vision Churchill presents is of a world hurtling to its own destruction that can do nothing but sell portions of its own demise back to itself. Economic systems mutate rather than merely founder, people indulge in bizarre forms of entertainment in lieu of hope, and all the while children suffer: “Some died of thirst; others from drinking the water.” It’s awfully funny, and then it’s just awful.
And yet these elderly women sit and talk, each one revealing a private horror, a way they’re not coping – and creep towards some kind of acceptance (although Churchill also suggests they’re keeping their heads in the sand). Hood is excellent as the outwardly content Lena, a woman whose struggles with depression are underplayed until they rupture. Lawrance gives a detailed and moving portrait of survivor guilt and Rubenstein is pitch perfect as a woman with a debilitating phobia of cats.
Morse is lovely as Mrs Jarrett in those moments of gentle connection with the group, and she has an absolute mastery of the text’s musicality and structure. But ultimately, she seems miscast. Those long monologues are too lenient, too temperate to convey the existential dread at their centre. Her cry of “terrible rage”, a phrase repeated over and over again until it takes on an almost biblical force, is too mild by far. Julie Forsyth, who played the role for Red Stitch back in 2019, made a symphony of chaos out of those two words.
What If If Only is something of a curio for Churchill, a work of interiority that is affecting and clever, but lacks her usual complexity. Alison Bell plays S, a woman racked by grief at the suicide of her partner. For a long while, she sits in silence over the remnants of a boiled egg as Paul Jackson’s rich lighting dims and brightens around her: the inference is that she’s sat here for weeks in a state of emotional paralysis.
A character referred to in the program only as F (Lucy Ansell, precise and winning) appears and says she’s a ghost – not of S’s former partner but of a potential future. F is soon followed by 16 other futures, equally determined to be made manifest and it becomes clear Churchill is interrogating the nature of grief and survival. How is S supposed to reach for a future if her current loss is insurmountable? How do you breathe into a new life if the past has you by the throat?
Bell is terrific, able to convey multitudes of despair under the surface of deadened shock. Churchill’s ending feels a little pat – there are echoes of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now running through it – and the overall effect is muted and slightly obvious.
Director Anne-Louise Sarks has approached both plays with admirable intensity and thoughtfulness, and the double bill is an excellent showcase for this essential playwright’s talent and skill. There is an emphasis on the domestic – Marg Horwell’s sets deliciously suggest the glory of earthly pleasures and quotidian spaces – at the expense of the catastrophic and universal. In some ways, like Morse’s playing of Mrs Jarrett, the production is a little too timid. Given the fires in Maui, the wars ravaging parts of Africa and Europe, Sarks could have pressed the alarm a little harder.
Escaped Alone and What If If Only is on at the Southbank Theatre until 9 September
