Time for tea and lurking horrors

ESCAPED ALONE Royal Court Downstairs, SW1

FOUR 70-something women sit chatting peaceably in a sunny suburban garden. What could possibly go wrong? This being a Caryl Churchill play, the answer is inevitable: pretty much everything. And so it swiftly does, as a series of horrors both personal and global are revealed to lurk beneath the surface banalities of everyday life.

Escaped Alone was a sell-out hit on its premiere at the Court last year and now James Macdonald’s production returns with the fine original cast — Linda Bassett, Deborah Findlay, Kika Markham and June Watson — intact. Bassett is as terrific as ever as the benignly nosy neighbour Mrs Jarrett, who breaks off regularly from the group to give us, under frazzling neon lights, increasingly outré descriptions of worldwide Armageddon, of famine, floods and other Biblical afflictions with a distinctly modern-day spin.

Vivid details of fears, secrets and crimes soon crop up in the group talk as well. Nothing is stable, nothing is safe, says Churchill, the ever-fierce formal experimenter, but I couldn’t help wondering what the point of all this was. Despite the mounting tales of catastrophe, it all seems increasingly inconsequential, not least because Churchill’s pattern doesn’t vary from the first minute to the 50th and last. Disaster is all around. Let’s have another cup of tea.

Until February 11 (020 7565 5000, royalcourttheatre.com)