Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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by Caryl Churchill, directed by Jennifer Tarver
Soulpepper Theatre Company & Necessary Angel, Young Centre, Toronto
November 1-25, 2018
Lena: “...but you do wonder why of course, so you make a story...”
Caryl Churchill’s 2016 play Escaped Alone may run only 50 minutes but it plumbs more depths in the human mind and its headlong run toward self-destruction than most plays two or three times its length. It is also an enigma since we know nothing about the character who mediates between us and the play except for her description of a global apocalypse of which we see no trace. I was lucky enough to see the world premiere production of the play at the Royal Court Theatre directed by Churchill’s frequent director James Macdonald. The present Soulpepper/Necessary Angel production directed by Jennifer Tarver gives only a pale glimpse of the play, missing several features that are central to casting light on Churchill’s obscure purposes.
The structure is deceptively simple. Mrs. Jarrett (Clare Coulter) walks past an open gate in a fence and sees three women inside on the back lawn chatting and, when identified as spying on them, goes to join them. Yet, Mrs. Jarrett is presented as existing in two separate worlds – one in which she is with the other three woman, and one in which she is separate from them and apparently inside her own head.
When isolated from the generally comic scenes of the women’s seemingly idle chatter, Mrs. Jarrett’s describes global apocalypses that happened sometime in the past. The difficulty with Mrs. Jarrett’s descriptions is that each seems to detail a different type of cataclysm. 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. In her different versions the destruction is caused variously by earth, air, water, fire, money and starvation.
The Soulpepper/Necessary Angel production misses two central aspects of the play vital to understanding its meaning. The Royal Court production presented the play on a proscenium stage. Upstage was the realistic back garden of Vi’s house, but between that set and the front of the proscenium was a black space surrounded by two frames of lights that separated it from the garden and from the audience. Into this apparent void, Mrs. Jarrett would literally step out of the garden set accompanied by an electronic zap. This scenic design clearly set Mrs. Jarrett’s apocalyptic narratives apart from garden scenes including her own private monologue that like those of the other three is spoken within the garden. Macdonald thus clearly and deliberately made Mrs. Jarrett’s apocalyptic narratives unplaceable.
Macdonald had Mrs. Jarrett speak directly to the audience so that we could not tell whether she was informing us of calamities that existed in her past and our future or whether she was providing some sort of metaphorical commentary on what she has been observing in the garden, since these description of the past apocalypse happen only after she has entered the garden.
The Soulpepper/Necessary Angel production, unfortunately, has chosen to present the play in an alley staging. This cuts down on the expense of a set, but it also means there is no physical acting area separate from the three other women where Mrs. Jarrett can deliver her narratives of calamity. Jennifer Lennon tries to separate Mrs. Jarrett from the others by using a pinspot on her face, but then she does this when the other women give their monologues thus making making them all seem like inner monologues we hear aloud rather than differentiating Mrs. Jarrett’s apocalyptic narratives from her “terrible rage” speech when she is among the women. Thus a crucial aspect of Churchill’s structure and of the play’s ambiguity is lost.
Even worse, for such a short play, Tarver does not understand Mrs. Jarrett’s relationship to the other three women. The description of the play in the programme claims that Mrs. Jarrett and the three women are old friends, but this is not true. When Mrs. Jarrett is spotted, Vi says, “Don’t look now but there’s someone watching us” to which Lena says, “Is it that woman?” Only when Sally names her, does Mrs. Jarrett enter, but that should not be mistaken for an invitation. Instead, Mrs. Jarrett has been caught spying on the three women.
In the Royal Court production, Macdonald made it very clear that the three women are not at all interested in Mrs. Jarrett. They ask her no questions and ignore what she says. It is no accident that Churchill gives us the first names of Lena, Sally and Vi, but not of Mrs. Jarrett, because the others are not on a first-name basis with her. Even in the scene when the four sing a song, Churchill indicates that Mrs. Jarret is excluded because the other three sing in harmony while Mrs. Jarrett is left doubling the melody.
Tarver captures none of Mrs. Jarrett’s attempts to fit in and constantly being rebuffed and mistakenly tries to portray the four as a unified group. In the Royal Court production is was easy to see that Mrs. Jarrett’s “terrible rage” could easily refer to her present humiliating experience. Besides that, Mrs. Jarrett is the only one in the play who can be said to have “escaped alone”, i.e. when she leaves the three to themselves at the end.
Churchill specifies that the play is written for women over 70, even though some of the cast in the world premiere were only in their late 60s. While ignorant of the actors’ true ages, here only Clare Coulter gives the impression of a woman over 70. Brenda Robins patently looks far too young, so that Churchill’s goal of writing a play for older women, a segment of the acting profession neglected by too many playwrights, is defeated.
Coulter has always had the knack of making her characters seem unhinged even when they are not. So it is here. The problem is that this makes Mrs. Jarrett’s narrations of disaster all appear to be fantasies of her character rather than reports on a possible past history as was the case in the Royal Court production. This results in a further loss of ambiguity. When Lena refers to Mrs. Jarrett as “that woman” is it because Mrs. Jarrett is know to be bonkers? It that why the three try to ignore her even when she is sitting with them? In the Royal Court production. Linda Bassett made Mrs. Jarrett’s “terrible rage” speech truly frightening by delivering it in a rising crescendo. Coulter seems merely to be muttering the words under her breath without any clear reference to what is causing the rage.
While Robins is too young to be Vi and hardly looks as if she had spent six years in prison for manslaughter, she yet conveys Vi’s cocky attitude well that verges on aggression. Vacratsis is note-perfect as Sally. She makes Sally seems concerned and polite but also makes us notice the many micro-aggressions she commits against all her supposed friends. Vacratsis makes Sally’s gracious willingness to be praised for lying about what Vi did to her husband both comic and terrifying at once. Harper is well cast as the agoraphobic Lena, a discomfort that Harper communicates more precisely through her voice than her posture which generally seems too relaxed.
Escaped Alone is a powerful but enigmatic play, powerful in many ways because it is so enigmatic. The principal revelation, which does not come across in the Soulpepper production, is that Churchill uncovers for us the seeds of dissension, conflict and disaster in what outwardly would appear the most innocuous event, a garden tea party. Mrs. Jarrett may be preoccupied with visions of apocalypses of the past that she and apparently the three other women have survived, but what really should chill us are the horrors that lie just below the polite surface of everyday life. Churchill found this as early as Top Girls (1982) when the child Angie sums up what she has discovered about her real mother as “Frightening”, the last word of the play. What Churchill discovers in Escaped Alone is that everyone has experienced something “frightening”. It is a fear made worse because it must be kept hidden so as not to upset social propriety. Yet hiding it keeps people apart and alone and so undermines the very society it is meant to preserve. The current production may not be ideal, but fans of Churchill will not want to miss this gem of a play that you will keep revolving in your mind for weeks afterward.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Brenda Robins, Clare Coulter, Maria Vacratsis and Clare Coulter; Brenda Robins; Clare Coulter. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit https://www.soulpepper.ca
2018-11-04
Escaped Alone