The National (Scotland) - Seven Days
A performance that disturbs And affects
Escaped Alone Tron Theatre, Glasgow
CARYL Churchill – the author of such modern classics as Top Girls (1982) and Cloud 9 (1979) – is one of the most inventive and fascinating dramatists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Artistically, she is a product of the explosion in modernist playwriting that brought us such writers as Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett.
In addition to its pronounced defiance of the laws of dramatic naturalism (such as the linear narrative), her work has always had a strong political dimension. Her 2009 piece Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza was denounced as “horrifically anti-Israel” by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
However, it was defended as “dense, beautiful [and] elusive” by American playwright Tony Kushner and, his compatriot, academic Alisa Solomon (both of whom are Jewish).
In 2022, she was stripped of the European Drama Award (which had been given to her by the Schauspiel Stuttgart in recognition of her life’s work) due to her support for BDS (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel.
It is in these artistic and political contexts that we should consider director Joanna Bowman’s new production of Churchill’s short 2016 play Escaped Alone for the Tron theatre company.
The piece is set among four older women – relative outsider Mrs Jarrett (Blythe Duff), Lena (Anne Kidd), Vi (Irene Macdougall) and Sally (Joanna Tope).
Familiar, perhaps friendly with each other, these characters are sitting together in a garden chatting. The prosaic nature of their initial conversations is disturbed by a creeping, formal jaggedness.
Over time further complications are suggested by Sally’s extreme phobia of cats and Vi’s revelation of a life-altering event from her past (which, it transpires, was witnessed by Sally). There is, in these conversations, a subtle sabotaging of social conventions that is reminiscent of the plays of Harold Pinter.
However, in the other aspect of the piece – a series of monologues delivered by Mrs Jarrett on a raised platform behind the garden – any sense of reassuring domesticity is exploded entirely. Here, in speeches of terrifying descriptiveness and bleak absurdism, we are told of horrendous dystopian catastrophes.
We hear of huge numbers of people being killed or driven to desperate means of survival by an aquatic tsunami or widespread chemical poisoning. Yet, these monologues have a defamiliarising, darkly comic dimension.
Far from creating recognisable images of apocalypse, the catalyst in these events is often an aspect of the modern economic system or popular culture. Seemingly incompatible or unrelated concepts collide disconcertingly as Duff’s character relates the events with a poetic detachedness.
The play shifts constantly beneath our feet, constantly calling into question the supposedly coherent sense that the powerful try to impose on the chaotic world in which we live.
Bowman’s production rises to the challenges of Churchill’s uncertain and disturbing text. It is blessed with four excellent performances, and with a sharp, contrasting set, exceptional video and sound, and memorably innovative lighting.
Tory tax and spending plans if they win the election. They have ruled out any increases to the top rate of income tax, corporation tax, and any consideration of new wealth taxes.
Sometimes you do have to ask – what is the point of the Labour Party? Which brings me funnily enough to this year’s election.
My old friend Kenny Farquharson in his Times column last week predicts the coming election in Scotland to be competition between class and national identity.
He couldn’t be more wrong. The contest will be about who will stand up for those in Scotland without capital, those who work for a living, the majority. How the envied natural resources of this rich country will be deployed for the benefit of those people. In short, who will move us on the economic journey that Denmark and others have already taken?
Who will deliver what we used to call “social democracy”?
Some still place their faith in a Labour-led UK to deliver that objective. Not in this lifetime. Not when the leadership of that party have already abandoned that ambition.
Kenny is right about one thing: “Holyrood’s new tax powers mean [the SNP] have to place themselves somewhere on a right-left axis.”
He ought to acknowledge they already have. Given the chance, the SNP have consistently sought to increase the public realm and place their funding on a more progressive and fairer basis.
Of course, in the devolved government of Scotland, such changes can only be made at the margins. The administration has precisely zero control over the movement of capital and labour.
But that doesn’t stop us from working up a prospectus on what could be done had we the powers to act. The Scottish Government’s recent economy paper sets out some important parameters on that. In the coming election campaign, we can put flesh on those bones.
Voting SNP will mean pressure on a new UK Government – whether minority or majority Labour. We will press them to make the real living wage statutory, to extend it to all young workers, to scrap standing charges and cap energy bills, to outlaw privatisation of the NHS, to drive on towards a renewable revolution, to scrap anti-trade union laws, to reset foreign policy, to change the voting system, and much more besides. And maybe, just maybe, some of this will happen.
But we will also press one demand above all others – to give the people who live here the right to choose whether to become an independent country. Because independence is not about identity. It is the political agency to allow us to change.
This is a country which has the motive to be a better, fairer one. It has the means. What we need now is the opportunity.