Escaped Alone and What If If Only at Royal Exchange Theatre – review

This double bill of 21st century plays by Caryl Churchill may both be short but they are certainly not sweet. As with much of her work, these are playful and innovative in form and rejoice in the absurd while also relishing the challenge of dealing with uncomfortable subject matter.

Director Sarah Frankcom brings a quiet but resolute fierceness to the work she chooses to direct and this is no exception. In Escaped Alone, Frankcom ensures that the four actresses on stage can drink tea in a sunny back garden yet fully embrace the apocalyptic absurdity of the world Churchill portrays.

In What If If Only a young woman bargains with alternate futures as she desperately tries to navigate the grieving process. Both plays are unflinching observations on the pains and perils of living and of dying yet both are peppered with wry humour and wit that a strong cast delight in.

Escaped Alone is the more substantial play and features three old friends in their 70s having tea in the garden before a neighbour joins them. Initially the meandering conversation flows from grandchildren to reminiscing about decimalisation and the demise of the local ironmongers, but quickly veers off into darker territory. These women know each other so well they finish each other’s sentences and have no compunction around addressing each other’s issues. One has fallen out of love with her kitchen and been locked up in prison for manslaughter (or possibly murder) while another is trapped in her home due to depression and a third is locked in a cycle of OCD due to her irrational fear of cats. It is Mrs Jarrett who walks into this gathering and clumsily joins in the conversation.

The wonderful Maureen Beattie delivers the apocalyptic monologues that pepper this piece. Descriptions of blind babies, waiting lists for gas masks yet a choice of colours if you pay privately and starving commuters watching breakfast on iPlayer are all delivered with a chilling matter–of-fact tone.

Annette Badland, Souad Faress and Margot Leicester are uniformly excellent as friends Vi, Lena and Sally. The cadences of their speeches flow into each other beautifully as they chat together or spar and spark off one another. They encapsulate women navigating extraordinary everyday lives while, like so many of us, only letting in as much of the dark that is bearable. The arrival of Mrs Jarrett is like that discordant voice that wakes us at 4am, when we cannot escape our darkest fears. We can distract that background unease with tea and chatter, but every so often it gets in our heads and screams with rage and fear.

What If If Only is a haunting glimpse into bereavement. Danielle Henry plays Someone, a woman desperately caught in the bargaining phase of grief. Churchill suggests alternate futures, or ghosts of dead futures, as glimpses of what could have been. Henry evokes all the pain and mania of grief as she converses with her dead partner’s empty chair and pleads for a sign that he is somehow still present.

There is a piercing honesty that will resonate with anyone who has conversed aloud with the dead. There is no comfort or escape from the enormity of loss, and bargaining on What If If Only is simply a momentary escape from missing a loved one.