Theatre: Escaped Alone, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Five stars
Home and garden are sanctuary and safe house for the four women of certain ages who line up in Caryl Churchill’s quietly devastating play. As it digs deep into what lies beneath the small talk and shared experiences of friends on a sunny afternoon, a series of everyday revelations give way to something more globally seismic.
It begins with Blythe Duff’s Mrs Jarrett stumbling on Lena, Vi and Sally catching some rays as they indulge in chit chat, gossip and tittle tattle as any group of long standing friends and neighbours might do. As everyday mundanities hint at more complex lives, each scene is punctuated with a monologue that reveal worlds of personal and global devastation.
Churchill’s play dates from 2016. In a post Covid world, Joanna Bowman’s revival has a hauntingly fresh resonance. Ushered in by sound designer Susan Bear’s foreboding drones, Anne Kidd as Lena, Joanna Tope as Sally, Irene Macdougall as Vi and Duff as cuckoo in the nest Mrs Jarrett line up on Anna Orton’s grass strip set like golden girls having a holiday in the sun.
READ MORE: Caryl Churchill’s much heralded Escaped Alone comes to Glasgow's Tron
READ MORE: Damian Barr’s memoir Maggie & Me comes to the stage
The significance of the sunny skies and barren landscapes that beam from Lewis den Hertog’s slow burning video backdrop is brought home in tandem with Bear’s crashing soundscape.
Apart from anything else going on here, this is a magnificent showcase for four brilliant actresses, with Duff, Kidd, Macdougall and Tope bringing all their wisdom and experience to bear in a play of hidden depths that pulse its fifty or so minute running time with the brevity and discipline of an old school TV play. At its core is a troublingly current snapshot of a suburban Eden which acts as a haven for survivors of all kinds of catastrophes in a superbly realised production.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here