Escaped Alone

Set in a suburban English garden, revered British playwright Caryl Churchill’s play Escaped Alone (2016) alternates the gossip of four elderly female friends with a set of monologues: three of the friends reveal crippling anxieties, while the fourth, Mrs. Jarrett, narrates a contradictory and often absurd—but all-too-plausible—set of apocalypses in the past tense. The play debuted at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2016 to strong reviews. Critics noted that while Escaped Alone retains the leftist and feminist politics of Churchill’s best-known works Top Girls and Cloud 9, it also has a “fractured, occasionally abstract” quality which “points to Samuel Beckett” (The Atlantic). The play’s title refers to the Biblical Book of Job from which the play also takes an epigraph.

The play opens as Mrs. Jarrett walks down a suburban street. Peering through an open garden gate, she sees three women whom she knows sitting together in a garden around an untouched tea tray. They invite her in, Mrs. Jarrett sits, and the four women continue to discuss personal topics in an easygoing way, from the trivial (lost keys) to the serious (battles with disease). All four women are over 70 and have long working and family lives behind them. The tea is never served.

This pleasant conversation is frequently interrupted, however, by Mrs. Jarrett, who stands to address the audience for brief monologues. In these asides, she appears to be narrating a totally different reality (or set of realities), in which civilization has come to an apocalyptic end. She describes flooding, fires, mass evacuations, rockfalls, countries turned into desolate wastelands. There is a slightly absurdist tone to most of her descriptions of this world: “The number of birth deformities outstrips the yearly immigration of plastic surgeons.” Over time, these monologues contradict each other, offering alternate versions of the apocalypse. In one, rocks are engineered by corporations to fall on the underclass—individual rocks are targeted at the heads of each child—and the survivors move underground. In another, flooding forces people to move onto their roofs, where they hunt pigeons with nets. The monologues give no clue about whether they are truth or fantasy, or why Mrs. Jarrett is their speaker.



Meanwhile, we get to know the other women. Sally is eager, a retired NHS worker, Lena is somewhat shy and used to be an office worker. Vi, a retired hairdresser, is more working-class than the other two women, but she is cheerful and outgoing and easily fits in. The four women have an easy rapport, finishing each other’s sentences, and at one point even breaking into a flawless a cappella rendition of a song from their youth (in the Royal Court production, it was The Crystals’ 1963 hit, “Da Doo Ron Ron.”)

Their conversation seems to place them firmly in the present day. The women are disparaging about young people’s addiction to iPhones and cooking shows. However, their dialogue sometimes becomes cryptic, hinting at alternative reality or dystopia, for instance with the discussion of a “trigger” word.

Mrs. Jarrett’s asides draw on—or parallel—these conversations. In her third monologue, she remarks that “the hunger began when eighty percent of food was diverted to TV programs. Commuters watched breakfast on iPlayer on their way to work. Smartphones were distributed by charities when rice ran out, so the dying could watch cooking.” Meanwhile, the obese sold themselves by the slice and mushrooms were “traded for urine.”



Later in the play, the other three women offer their own monologues, different in character to Mrs. Jarrett’s. Sally reveals a profound fear of cats—so profound that it veers beyond phobia into obsessive-compulsive disorder: all night she checks and rechecks the lock on her front door in case a cat has gotten in. Vi reveals that many years earlier she killed her husband, perhaps in self-defense (she is unclear on that point even now). After six years in prison, she found herself estranged from her son. She worries that she exposed him to too much blood. Lena is extremely agoraphobic: a single thought can pin her to the spot for hours. She can’t make it to the grocery shop, but she longs to visit Japan. Mrs. Jarrett repeats the words “terrible rage,” over and over. The play resists conclusions, instead, allowing its sense of fear and anger to build and build, as the shadows lengthen on the afternoon.

Escaped Alone viciously satirizes a contemporary capitalist culture which it portrays as moribund and rapacious. At the same time, it celebrates the (often unheard) voices and feelings of aging women, merging the resilience it might take to survive an imminent apocalypse with the resilience it takes to survive 70 years as a woman in a moribund and rapacious culture.