Escaped Alone & What If If Only – Royal Exchange

Caryl Churchill has been feted amongst the theatrical fraternity for over half a century. Through her associations with The Royal Court and Joint Stock companies and their exploration of feminist themes and sexual identity, she was in the vanguard of gender politics, her style of writing and staging drawing comparisons with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. My exposure to her work has been limited to a production of ‘The Skriker’ at this theatre for the Manchester International Festival a decade ago, so I was keen to delve deeper into her worldview with this presentation of two of her later works as a double bill.

Helmed by Sarah Frankcom, who, as the acclaimed former Artistic Director of this theatre, knows the opportunities and pitfalls of directing in this unique space, the audience is presented with two separate pieces with no overt links between them. The first, ‘Escaped Alone’, presents us with an ostensibly idyllic scene: four women sitting in a garden on a hot summer day, chatting and catching up with each other’s news and gossip. Only when the inner thoughts of the four are revealed individually in monologue do we see the turmoil, anguish, and pain that they are each experiencing. Lena (Souad Faress) withdraws from the world and is castigated for it; Sally (Margot Leicester) harbors an irrational fear of cats; Vi (Annette Badland) processes a horrific past event; and Mrs. Jarrett (Maureen Beattie) shares her apocalyptic worldview.

The style takes some getting used to for the audience. Churchill’s writing is naturalistic and best delivered with constant interruption and overlapping dialogue, mimicking the speech patterns of everyday life. Unfortunately, this evening, the piece felt too staccato; each line felt separate and not part of a normal conversation. Pinteresque pauses punctuated and killed the flow. The direction moved the four actors in sequence around the circular auditorium, further removing the sense of normal conversation, which is necessary for this piece to succeed. When the actors moved into monologue, they were starkly lit, and the absurdism of Churchill’s dialogue was allowed to flourish more freely. Leicester juxtaposed the quiet rationality of the local GP when chatting with her friends with her unhinged cat phobia during a monologue that bore resemblance to a Stewart Lee comedy routine in its use of repetition and increasing violence. Similarly, Beattie portrayed the quiet old lady, sporting wrinkled stockings and Crocs, hiding a violent imagination in her view of the descent of society into chaos, where “the obese are reduced to selling slices of themselves”—an extraordinarily graphic and depressing view of our future.

Both performances were strong, but as the piece closed abruptly after an hour, I felt no connection with any of the characters or any real sense of their frustration at being marginalized by a society that doesn’t listen to older women or value their opinions.

Following the interval, ‘What If If Only’, an even more pithy piece from Churchill, offered a meditation on the nature of grief and the possibility of choice. A shorthand description of this twenty-five-minute short play would be ‘A Christmas Carol’- or ‘Caryl’, if you love a pun—with Someone (Danielle Henry) as a recently widowed woman visited by Future (Annette Badland again), Present (Lamin Touray), and Child (Bea Glancy) to offer visions of all the alternate futures that are possible. Whether these manifestations are a symptom of her grief or a Dickensian possibility of change is left to the audience to discuss in the bar afterwards. This short piece is intriguing in its interpretation of the multiverse of possibilities that small changes to history can make to our present and future lives.

Henry is excellent in conveying the confusion and overwhelming nature of the loss of a partner: a favorite song playing on repeat, photographs, and the detritus of a life that was shared and cut short littering the lounge set design of Rose Revitt, adding to the realism. The truncated running time concentrated the emotions, tightly drawn and sharp in its execution.

Reviewer: Paul Wilcox

Reviewed: 12th February 2025

North West End UK Rating: