A ringside seat for the four tea-drinkers of the Apocalypse
Escaped Alone
Royal Court Theatre
★★★ ★★
Apocalypse is in the air in Caryl Churchill’s latest play. You can sense it in the too-bright sunlight that drenches the back garden, where four septuagenarian women are chatting over a cup of tea. You feel it in the deep, black shadows that frame the garden. And you hear it in the short monologues delivered by Linda Bassett’s Mrs Jarrett, who every so often steps out of the garden into the blackness to describe a contemporary world ravaged by various biblical plagues.
Dressed in leggings and an old khaki jacket, she’s part prophet of future destruction, part refugee from some unnervingly distorted parallel present.
Directed by James Macdonald, this production is notable first for starring four mature actresses (a rare sight on stage indeed). Each is completely terrific – from Deborah Findlay’s Sally, whose smug, soothing tones barely conceal a twitchy nervousness, to Kika Markham’s agoraphobic Lena, as fragile as a leaf, via June Watson’s cackling, sharp-as-tacks Vi, who has spent several years in prison.
It’s a tantalising streak of strangeness that Bassett’s equally excellent Jarrett doesn’t know this fact about Vi. As the conversation takes in the latest TV blockbusters and the antique shop that has replaced the old grocer’s, she remains on the outskirts, like a ghostly visitation.
Churchill has often blended the malign with the routine, but what marks out this 50-minute play is its detailed human feeling. These are real, lived-in women with palpable anxieties and fears. In contrast, Bassett’s apocalyptic dispatches – which mix vivid, satirical dystopian imagery that skewers such modern phenomena as the growth of privatised health care and our obsession with TV cookery shows – feel like a distraction and a bit of a gimmick: the real catastrophes are in the garden, under the sun.
Sally nurses a crippling terror of cats. Vi is haunted by blood and the fact she barely sees her grown-up son. Lena is imprisoned by a depression that paralyses her for hours, sometimes days, at a time. Mrs Jarrett repeats the words “terrible rage” over and over like a religious incantation.
As often with Churchill, you find yourself questioning whether what you’re hearing actually amounts to an enormous amount. With its jagged, minimalist dialogue and sudden, flashlit images, the play often feels like a series of discordant gestures ricocheting back and forth with nowhere to go.
But the play is worth seeing for its outstanding performances that together summon a persuasive atmosphere of casual, everyday horror.
Until March 12. Tickets: 020 7565 5000; royalcourttheatre.com