The ObserverTheatreReviewRoyal Court, London
Caryl Churchill’s magnificent new play unleashes an intricate, elliptical, acutely female view of the apocalypse
So which is the best moment in Caryl Churchill’s sizzling new play? Is it when Linda Bassett steps out of a cosy, brightly lit back garden and becomes Cassandra, sketching one of the horrors she sees the world bringing on itself? Famine will break out when 80% of food is “diverted to TV programmes”. People will just “watch breakfast on iPlayer”.
Is it when outstanding June Watson, seemingly phlegmatic, lets loose a secret to do with a knife and a husband? Or when the four women on stage – in a rare stage direction, Churchill specifies that they are “all at least 70” – launch into Da Doo Ron Ron? Nudging one another with the words, rolling their shoulders while rooted in their chairs, they make a melodic kite that lifts them high.
Escaped Alone is a light-on-its-feet, elliptical view of apocalypse. It runs for less than an hour. It foresees that when we are poisoned by chemical leaks, private patients will be able to buy gas masks in assorted colours. That when a wind developed by property developers starts turning heads inside out, the army will fire nets to catch flying cars. That the obese will sell slices of themselves.
This is fantasy intricately wired into current politics. It is intimate and vast. Domestic and wild. And it is a consequence of the marvellous, long-standing collaboration between Churchill and director James Macdonald. Bassett delivers her rich evocations of disaster in darkness framed with red-hot light. This is one of the mind spaces that Macdonald and designer Miriam Buether excel at creating. They pulled off something similar in The Father.
Meanwhile, in that back garden the four women chat. And unleash their secret selves in extraordinary monologues. Deborah Findlay, subtlest of actors, is apparently relaxed and sinuous. She invites the adjective “feline”. Until she lets rip with a catalogue of reasons to fear cats. They could be anywhere. In matchboxes and casserole dishes. Kika Markham, inimitably inward, whose mouth seems to have direct access to her heart, tells of and shows the dimming of light that is depression: the occlusion, the inability to move, the pointlessness of moving your mouth to “do talking”.
Apparently implacable, Bassett always has wit tucked into the corner of her mouth like a sweet.Still, it is magnificent Bassett, one of our greatest and least anointed actors, who is the queenpin of the action. Apparently implacable, she always has wit tucked into the corner of her mouth like a sweet. Just look at her face break into beams at the word “biscuit”. She sports saggy leggings, an estuary accent and round shoulders. And she is bringing us the truth. This is a play that remakes the idea of authority.
Let’s pretend for a moment that all this is routine. That it is normal to assume that older women can get together without talking about the menopause, and that their experience might be seen as central rather than an inflection of men’s. The effect is revolutionary. Like looking at a sexually reversed photo of world leaders. Instead of a crowd of men and Angela Merkel in a trouser suit, you see a host of women. And David Cameron in a skirt.
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