Escaped Alone and What If Only at Royal Exchange Theatre
Review by Steve Cooke
The Royal Exchange Theatre is finding its form again with a double bill of one act plays by Caryl Churchill with Sarah Frankcom directing,
Escaped Alone and What If If Only in typical Caryl Churchill style present challenges for both the audience and the performers with uncomfortable subject matter presented in innovative ways.
Escaped Alone sees four 70+ aged women having tea in a sunny garden engaging In gentle banter and rambling conversation, wandering through such as grandchildren, decimalisation and bird flight, conversations that gradually take a darker turn.
Vi [Annette Badland] hates her kitchen, not surprising since it was there that she killed her husband - she has served years in prison for his manslaughter [or is it murder?]. Sally [Margot Leicester], a retired GP, has developed a debilitating OCD due to her cat phobia. Leena [Saoud Faress] has such a level of anxiety and depression that she can’t leave her own home. Mrs Jarrett [Maureen Beatie] has just wandered into the group and unexpectedly and quite shockingly delivers apocalyptic monologues as the other three are frozen in time.
Each goes on to have their solo moments in the spotlight expressing their inner traumas, but it is the eight monologues delivered superbly by Maureen Beattie that create horrific images of a dystopian world, images that unsettle and linger in the mind. Images such as starving people watching others eating breakfast on TV [a frightening take on Breakfast TV].A dystopia created by apoplectic earthquake, flood, poisoning, famine, tempest, sickness and fire with the suggestion of an underpinning of climate change.
There are excellent performances from the ensemble who do full justice to the verbal detail of Caryl Churchill’s script. The gradually building darkness is cleverly interspersed with moments of great humour delivered with expert timing. They very believably show how well these women know each other as they finish each other’s sentences and have no compunction around addressing each other’s darkest issues.
Rose Revitt’s set is a rectangle, representing a small lawn for Escaped Alone and evoke a small room for the shorter What If If Only.
The second short play, What If If Only, contains a very strong performance from Danielle Henry as Someone, a young woman who is grieving for a loved one. She is stuck in the bargaining phase of bereavement and is confronted by ghosts of possible dead futures, glimpses of what could have been.
Evocatively expressing all the pain and mania of grief we see Someone conversing with her dead partner’s empty chair, pleading for some sort of sign that he still present. Caryl Churchill bleakly emphasises that there can be comfort or escape from the enormity of loss, and bargaining can only be a momentary escape from missing a loved one.
The ghosts (Annette Badland again, as Future, Lamin Touray as Present, and Bea Glancy as Child) appear, and there’s exploration of what might have come about, maybe a future that wasn’t perfect, but better than what we got.
The Caryl Churchill double bill, directed by Sarah Frankcom, continues through to 8 March at the Royal Exchange Theatre, St Ann's Square, Manchester M2 7DH.
Phone: 0161 833 9833
Watch trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTe1p54KM5A
Kommentare