Dave PorterIt’s arguable that in youth-obsessed culture there’s a distinct lack of older people represented on stage, giving scant roles for those getting on in years. Beckett had some memorable characters and Arnold Wesker made some headway with The Old Ones, but the age gap is both noticeable and lamentable.
This double-hander from Caryl Churchill goes some way to rectifying the situation. In Escaped Alone, three friends – all retired – sit in the garden on a typically sunny day, enjoying tea and biscuits on the lawn. Annette Badland plays Vi, Maureen Beattie is Mrs Jarrett, Souad Frances is Lena, while Margot Leicester takes the role of interloper Sally.
Their conversation scatters over mundane affairs such as past careers, children and grandchildren, fractured with occasional ill-feeling and resentments naturally gained through long friendship.
Mrs Jarrett, a retired doctor, has a phobia about cats (watch out for the monologue); Lena suffers from agoraphobia – at one point she says she would have loved to visit Japan, only for Mrs Jarrett to respond: ‘Try getting to Tesco first’.
But it is the revelation from hairdresser Vi which causes the biggest stir. We learn early on that she has been ‘away’ for six years, only to discover later why.
Their conversations ramble amiably on until they are interrupted in flash scenes by neighbour Sally with torrid accounts of a apocalyptic near future (man-made or natural we never discover) in which bodies pile up in the streets, people live as troglodytes, and there is such an acute shortage of food that obese people make a living cutting off slices of their fat to sell on.
The moral seems to be that as the world burns and as personal lives implode, somehow – perhaps in a very English way – we carry on with our quotidian lives with tea and cake and trips to the dentist. Why? Because we have to, there is simply no alternative.
It’s not all doom and gloom, however, and there are some keen – if morbid – jokes throughout to add a touch of levity.
The speech is clipped and barely anyone completes a full sentence, adding to the fragmentary feel of the piece; the play – the longer of the two – ends with a sustained howl from Sally at the futility of existence. Beckett again: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’.
If Escaped Alone is fragmentary, the second piece, What If If Only, is decidedly elliptical. A short, sparse play, it features Danielle Henry as a woman whose partner has committed suicide and whom she continues to address in the chair he once inhabited. She is visited both by the future (Annette Badland again) and the present. The script touches upon the necessity to create our own worlds and features an ‘invasion’ of the set by actors from the Royal Exchange Elders, who admonish the woman for the failings of the world, and perhaps our own failure to take action on such important issues as war, domestic violence and climate change.
Carmel Thomason
Steve Timms
Liz Ratcliffe