Elsewhere
Elsewhere
✭✭✭✭✩
by Caryl Churchill, directed by James Macdonald
Royal Court Theatre, Jerwood Theatre, London, GBR
January 28-March 12, 2016;
January 25-February 11, 2017
Lena: “Why see anyone? Why know about anyone?”
Caryl Churchill’s latest play, Escaped Alone, is both one of her most entertaining works and one of her most mystifying. It’s quite disorienting to laugh right through the play’s 50 minutes and yet find yourself mentally struggling to understand precisely what it is you are witnessing. Churchill, of course, has always experimented with disorienting the audience as witnessed by the riotous gender-switched first act of Cloud 9 (1979) versus its serious second act, or the hilarious fantasy of the first scene of Top Girls (1982) versus the increasingly dark, realistic remainder of the play.
Escaped Alone is similar to these two earlier plays in juxtaposing the comic and the serious except for two important differences. First, in the new play Churchill alternates the two modes throughout the play rather than giving up the comic to focus on the serious. Second, the serious aspect of the play is so outrageous that it also comes across as comedy though of the bleakest kind.
The play begins with a view of the rickety wooden fence of Miriam Buether’s delightful set. This would appear naturalistic except for orange wiring that surrounds the outside of the stage opening and passes through orange coils looking like something from an old-fashioned sci-fi movie. The gate is ajar and we can glimpse a garden behind it. Along comes Linda Bassett as Mrs. Jarrett, who tells us that she’s walking past a fence and notices the gate open. She stands listening to the women behind the gate until one of them, calling attention to her spying, invites her in.
After a blackout we see Mrs. Jarrett in the back garden chatting with three other women – Sally (Deborah Findlay), Lena (Kika Markham) and Vi (June Watson) who owns the house. For the first seven of the eight scenes, we watch with amusement as the four women chat about seemingly inconsequential matters like relatives, marriages and friends’ hobbies. Yet each of these innocuous scenes ends abruptly with an electric buzz and hum. The garden scene suddenly blacks out and we see Mrs. Jarrett in a void between the lit-up orange coils around the outside of the stage opening and a parallel set of orange coils around the inside of the stage opening just where the garden set begins.
Situated in this void, Mrs. Jarrett tells us with odd enthusiasm about various increasingly improbable but cataclysmic events that have befallen the world. Populations are buried under thousands of tons of rock, villages are swept away by water, chemical leaks cause birth deformities, food supplies run out, winds blow deadly viruses around the world and fires destroy huge areas of the country. After each of these tales of unbelievable woe, the orange lights flicker and Mrs. Jarrett is back again in Vi’s cosy if unkempt garden with the three women. Neither Mrs. Jarrett nor they ever mention the destructive scenarios she has just described.
Gradually, unsettling details emerge among the idle chatter about the three women. Vi did six years in prison for “accidentally” murdering her husband. Sally, in the kindest possible way, suggests that it was not an accident. Vi, meanwhile, feels that the way for Sally to overcome her fear of cats is to speak about it rather than repress it and this brings Sally to the brink of a panic attack. Lena, we learn, was lucky enough to get up the emotional strength to leave her house at all to join Sally and Vi.
Churchill gives each of the four women an interior monologue signalled in a beautifully subtle way by Peter Mumford’s lighting. Those not speaking freeze, the sunny light suddenly turns cold and a bluish spotlight shines on the speaker from above. Sally’s monologue is about her disabling paranoid fear of cats ever since her own cat died. Lena we discover suffers from profound depression and often can’t get out of bed in the morning. Vi is still haunted in her house by the ghost of her dead husband.
All three of these friends, though together in front of us, are really alone and separated from the others by a fear they cannot utter aloud. Mrs. Jarrett, on the other hand, is not characterized by fear but by “terrible rage”, the two words which repeated with increasing ferocity make up her entire interior monologue.
An important point is that Mrs. Jarrett may be invited into the garden, but it is only because she has been spying on the women. Before Jarrett is invited in, Lena says, “Is it that woman?” as if they all know something negative about her that we do not. Though sitting with the other three women, the three all treat her as an outsider. We know the first names of the three, but never Mrs. Jarrett’s. Mrs. Jarrett asks questions about the three but they ask nothing in return to learn more about her. In Scene 6, Churchill’s stage directions state: “All sing Sally, Vi and Lena in harmony. Mrs Jarrett joins in the melody” as if even this late in the play Mrs. Jarrett is considered an outsider.
Is Mrs. Jarrett’s “terrible rage” linked to her various apocalyptic narratives? Does the fact that the three treat Mrs. Jarrett with outward politeness but still view her as “that woman” cause her “terrible rage” against them and her apocalyptic fantasies? Caryl Churchill’s plays have always been political. Is she using the superficial innocuousness of garden chat among women over 70 as a way of making us see how subtle prolonged prejudice can give rise to a desire in those excluded for the world to end in violence?
Churchill’s vision of complacent normality juxtaposed with visions of natural and manmade disasters has the terrible ring of authentically portraying the pernicious division in the world we live in now, with with the unconcerned and self-obsessed on one side and the enraged apocalyptic fantasists on the other. Are we so consumed by our own private fears because we are helpless to do anything about the many forms of universal destruction that we sense are coming? Or is the sense of the futility of doing anything so great that those who are preoccupied with how we are destroying ourselves seem mad?
Churchill’s epigraph notes that “escaped alone” occurs in both the Biblical Book of Job and in Melville’s novel Moby Dick. In Job 1:14-19 four messengers come to Job in quick succession to tell him how he has lost all his property and children to invasions, fire and wind and each concludes with a variation of “and I only am escaped alone to tell thee”. In Moby Dick, Ishmael uses this same phrase in his Epilogue to describe his state. Is Mrs. Jarrett’s situation equivalent to the messengers’ or to Ishmael’s? Is she shunned because she knows the truth or because she only thinks she does? She is also the most obvious person who has “escaped alone”, in this case by leaving the three women and their group solidarity and private miseries behind.
Churchill’s play leaves us with uncomfortable questions that are also unanswerable because Churchill deliberately does not give us enough information with which to understand Mrs. Jarrett or the nature of her visions. One reason why Escaped Alone gets so deeply under our skin is because it is so perfectly acted and its depiction of human interaction so believable. Mrs. Jarrett’s visions and her “terrible rage” may be more overtly perplexing, but the view of Lena, the meekest of the four, is certainly the most devastating. “Why move your mouth and do talking? Why see anyone? Why know about anyone?” Why should we? Because if we don’t we won’t have escaped being alone.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Linda Bassett, Deborah Findlay, Kika Markham and June Watson; Linda Bassett as Mrs. Jarrett. ©2016 Tristam Kenton.
For tickets, visit www.royalcourttheatre.com.
2016-02-19
London, GBR: Escaped Alone