Escaped Alone is funny and terrifying
Escaped Alone
★★★(out of 4) Written by Caryl Churchill. Directed by Jennifer Tarver. Until Nov. 25 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 50 Tank House Lane. soulpepper.ca or 416-866-8666 If we have to be in a global moment that feels like it’s on the precipice of environmental apocalypse and social collapse, boy, I am glad we have playwrights like Caryl Churchill to reflect the times.
There were moments watching Soulpepper and Necessary Angel Theatre’s production of
Escaped Alone, one of the most recent plays by the inestimable British theatremaker, in which I wondered what aliens would think if they found this play. Would they believe that silent communities really did form underneath disastrous rock slides or that the planet’s final vestiges of food were allocated to reality TV shows, and we instead watched our meals instead of consumed them?
Would they believe that powerful winds really moved entire cities, leaving inhabitants at risk of being arrested for not having proper travel documents?
I somehow feel it would be preferable to have the dangers of the current moment laid down in history as filtered through the brain of Churchill, leaving behind these terrifying and absurd and funny and undeniably familiar scenarios rather than the reality we’re experiencing. That’s especially true if these images are delivered by Clare Coulter, an actor with a razor sharp handle on Churchill’s words and an ability to speak across time and space.
In a play that takes its title from a line from the Book of Job — “I only am escaped alone to tell thee” — Coulter plays the enigmatic Mrs. Jarrett, who has seemingly escaped from some dystopian future to warn the present about these apocalyptic events.
In between her missives of calamity, Mrs. Jarrett joins three other women for tea: Vi (Brenda Robins), Lena (Kyra Harper) and Sally (Maria Vacratsis).
Here, Churchill elevates mundane chatter to eerie, heightened relevance: Sally dwells on the myriad places a cat could be hiding, without explaining why cats pose a threat in the first place; Lena feels despondent to the point of not wanting to move or talk, and Vi is still reckoning with a surprisingly brutal criminal history.
The friendship between the women is evident, especially between Sally and Vi, who laugh together as much as they clash, though the ensemble struggles with the off-kilter rhythm of Churchill’s dialogue, which unfolds like four monologues intercut with each other mid-sentence and for only a few words at a time.
Jennifer Tarver’s production nails the individual voices of the characters while muddying the group dynamic, but it still crams a thrilling dose of existential anxiety, humour and performance master craft into just under an hour running time.
That’s a very manageable amount of time to grab a tea and ponder the end of the world, as told by Caryl Churchill.