Review: ESCAPED ALONE, The Coronet Theatre

Caryl Churchill meets ‘il dolce far niente’ in this reimagined production of her 2016 play Escaped Alone. Italian companies lacasadargilla and Piccolo Teatro present a timid adaptation written by Monica Capuani and directed by Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli and Alessandro Ferroni. It’s a pity that the quintessentially bleak English approach of Churchill’s four ageing women as they spend their summer between tea and gossip fails to translate. Caught between the shackling boredom of retirement and a desire to maintain their identities, they reminisce and dig up the past, unearthing a few uncomfortable truths. In all this, Mrs. Jarrett slips into apocalyptic speeches that detail environmental disaster and societal collapse.

The piece is in itself not straightforward. Churchill’s blend of abstract surrealism screeches against a bland attempt at making it funny. There are also many inconsistencies in Caterina Carpio, Tania Garribba, Arianna Gaudio, and Alice Palazzi’s performances, which are mostly caricatural and unconvincing. Bad wigs and the visual juxtaposition of having relatively young women playing elders are only the tip of the iceberg. Their physicalities are erratic too, with parodic twists in their deliveries. As the four friends talk about their ailments and regrets, they reveal bits and pieces about themselves, going on many entertaining tangents.

One of these is a curious phobia that features cats breaking into one’s house and hiding. It’s hilarious in a perfectly dark manner, showing how compulsion and obsession take over the most irrational parts of our mind. It adds to the disparate considerations about the eclecticism of life we find in Churchill’s script. It’s unfortunate that it all comes off rather half-hearted. Even the final stretch where Mrs. Jarrett repeats the phrase “terrible rage” 25 times has no impact at all. It’s unclear where this lack of depth comes from.

The direction is quiet, almost frozen, leaning into deep silences and broken only by machine-gun monologues (the highlight of the show). The weight of the climate emergency and the jarring prospects of the debris of capitalistic progress become an echo – literal and metaphorical. Mrs. Jarrett’s asides resound ominously, arresting the (in)action as the lights slightly dim. Ferroni sets the scene in a grim garden, surrounding it by hedges that look like they’re decomposing into black sludge right in front of our eyes.

In a dystopian twist, a screen hovers over the set. Ads that suspiciously feel like they were made by AI interrupt the images of clouds and grey skies. The women immediately turn to watch in silence. It’s allegorical enough, but doesn’t bear much relevance in the long run. There’s perhaps an untranslatable, unique sensibility in the original text that was lost in translation. The rhythm of Churchill’s structure also seems to have been diluted, negating the cleverness of its form and the punctuating emphases of its tonal changes. Having seen the first production, this is a frustrating hour. Terrible rage, terrible rage