Escaped Alone**** What If If Only*** REVIEW 11 Aug 2023

THEATRE
Escaped Alone ★★★★ and What If If Only ★★★ 

Written by Caryl Churchill

Melbourne Theatre Company 

Southbank Theatre, The Sumner, until September 9, 2023

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

This review was first published in The Age Arts online on Sat 12 Aug 2023 and in print on Mon 14 Aug 2023. I’ll present a radio review on Arts Weekly on 3MBS on Sat 19 Aug 2023. KH

Click the link below to read the review in The Age Arts Live Reviews:

Escaped Alone/What if if Only

MTC_EscapedAlone_04-L-R Helen Morse, Deidre Rubenstein, Kate Hood, Debra Lawrance-photo by Pia Johnson.

This unique double bill of short plays, Escaped Alone and What If If Only, typifies UK playwright Caryl Churchill’s work over her prolific, six-decade career. Both works, directed by Anne-Louise Sarks, are non-naturalistic, experiment with dramatic form and structure, incorporate eclectic styles and shifts in time and place. They ask probing questions, address disquieting subjects, shock us into awareness and demand our attention.

 

In the 45-minute Escaped Alone, the domestic intersects with the global and epic, and the absurd collides with the tragic and horrific. In designer, Marg Horwell’s idyllic garden with blooms peeking from amongst tall grasses, four older women (Helen Morse, Deidre Rubenstein, Kate Hood, Debra Lawrance), engage in banal, afternoon tea chatter about their ordinary, daily lives.

 

Morse’s Mrs Jarrett is the outsider, the spectator, an interloper invited into the inner circle of neighbours with a shared history. She is wiry, spare and disconcertingly birdlike, pecking out her occasional, terse contributions to the chit chat.

 

It is heartening to see four female characters over 70 on stage, and these captivating actors relish the challenge of Churchill’s carefully crafted, poetic, rhythmic language. Their tightly cued, crisp, often hilarious dialogue ebbs and flows, veering into non sequiturs or song, overlapping and interrupting like old friends’ conversation. Suddenly and surprisingly, their serene nattering tilts into intense monologues, revealing despair, fears and dark secrets; just as abruptly, it tilts back to the banal.

 

Morse’s alarmingly grim but restrained monologues punctuate the play. She emerges alone from unnerving total blackout to dispassionately describe a chilling, apocalyptic world of global disease, famine and death that collides with the tranquillity of the neighbourhood garden and the women’s tepid chatter. This collision of styles and ideas exemplifies Churchill’s work.

 

What If If Only, a shorter work of 25 minutes, is the less successful of the two plays, although the first ten minutes are gripping. Alison Bell is a woman, known only as S, shattered by grief at the loss of her partner and grasping at any possibility that her late beloved will communicate with her. Her grief is palpable and heart-wrenching.

 

In the first minutes, Bell sits alone, silently eating a boiled egg at her kitchen table, while Paul Jackson’s cunningly designed lighting suggests time passing, day shifting into night and into day – again and again.

 

However, the impact of this intense, intimate portrait of loneliness and loss is dissipated, then completely lost, when multiple actors enter, representing the woman’s possible, unlived futures. This splits the focus by crowding the stage with over a dozen actors: some silent, others bombarding her with images of dystopian or utopian futures, damaged worlds or lost dreams. Churchill’s script does not name characters or specify gender, and the number of actors is at the director’s discretion, but fewer actors might crystalise the woman’s existential predicament thus focussing our attention.

 

Churchill’s playwriting remains intelligent, innovative, incisive and insightful and her themes resonate with contemporary audiences. Churchill devotees will be enthralled by these two works, while the uninitiated may leave bemused, but the compelling performances of the leads in both plays are memorable highlights.

 

By Kate Herbert

MTC_WhatIfIfOnly_Alison Bell_photo PiaJohnson

ESCAPED ALONE CAST

Lena Kate Hood
Vi Debra Lawrance
Mrs Jarrett Helen Morse
Sally Deidre Rubenstein

 

WHAT IF IF ONLY CAST

F Lucy Ansell
S Alison Bell
P Steve Mouzakis
Fs Anna Francesca Armenia
Fs Iopu Auva’a
Fs Sepideh Fallah
Fs Kate Hood
Fs Debra Lawrance
Fs Helen Morse
Fs Jalen Ong
Fs Tomas Parrish
Fs Deidre Rubenstein
C Teja Kingi
C Caleb Lee
C Imogen Premraj
Fs Aubrey Flood
Fs Aram Geleris
Fs Jonty Reason

 

CREATIVE TEAM

Director Anne-Louise Sarks
Set & Costume Designer Marg Horwell
Lighting Designer Paul Jackson
Composer & Sound Designer Jethro Woodward
Voice & Text Coach Geraldine Cook-Dafner
Assistant Director Brigid Gallacher