When comfortable western life meets global catastrophe
Escaped Alone Tron, Glasgow The Full Monty Theatre Royal, Glasgow
If Andy Arnold’s artistic directorship at the Tron Theatre had one special hallmark, it was his determination to offer audiences the Scottish premiers of brilliant new plays. Exactly a year ago,he directed a thrilling Scottish premier of Glasgow-based writer David Ireland’s magnificent pitchblack comedy Cyprus Avenue, first seen at the Royal Court.
And at the Tron, meanwhile, the company offers another Scottish premier of an astonishing Royal Court play, this time performed by four superb leading women of the Scottish stage. What makes Caryl Churchill’s 50-minute drama Escaped Alone such a remarkable play is the immense concentrated skill and inspiration with which Britain’s greatest living playwright creates an epic drama in such a small space. The birdsong is loud, as the play starts; four elderly women meet in a leafy back garden, on a summer afternoon, and shoot the breeze.
At first, the play seems like a brilliantly-observed comedy about the extraordinariness of apparently ordinary lives. The women share their health grumbles, and reminisce about their working lives; while it gradually emerges that one of them, Vi, has served six years in prison for killing her abusive husband, a fact her two chums seem to take in their stride.
There is a fourth woman with them, though, an acquaintance who happened to be passing; and it’s through this woman, Mrs Jarrett, that the play suddenly soars and crashes into something else a horrific yet fiercely satirical and poetic account of a global catastrophe that Mrs Jarrett alone apparently survives to describe.
In that moment, Churchill’s play becomes part of the growing body of work that seeks to dramatise the ever more surreal conjunction between the continuing relative comfort of most western lives, and the encroaching global horrors that we witness daily on our screens. The sheer power of Churchill’s writing, and the intensifyingbrillianceofthe alternationbetweenthescenes in the garden and Mrs Jarrett’s monologues, make this perhaps the briefest and most brilliant of all those plays.
And in Joanna Bowman’s production - backed by Susan Bear’s haunting sound, and wonderful monochrome video by Lewis den Hertog - Churchill’s text is superbly performed by a remarkable cast, featuring Irene Macdougall, Joanna Tope, Anne Kidd, and the inimitable Blythe Duff as Mrs. Jarrett, the woman who somehow lives to tell the tale of unimaginable catastrophe, and of the end of our fragile world.
The current UK touring production of The Full Monty, meanwhile, comes as a timely reminder that not all western lives are cushioned by luxury and affluence. Based on his script for the hugely popular 1997 film, Simon Beaufoy’s play tells the tale of a group of unemployed former steel workers who work out that their best hope of making some fast cash, in the 1990’s, lies in imitating the Chippendales, and taking their clothes off in front of roaring all-female audiences.
What makes the show both poignant and hilarious, though, is that the group of six men who eventually come together are such a mixed and unlikely bunch, ranging from wide-boy Gaz and his overweight mate Dave, to middle-class Gerald, whose wife doesn’t even know he’s lost his job. Michael Gyngell’s gorgeous cast do the play full justice, in a warm and richly enjoyable show that tours on to Aberdeen, next month.
Escaped Alone at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow until 9 March. The Full Monty at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, 19-23 March.