ESCAPED ALONE Comes to The Everyman Cork & Hatch Theatre Company

Hatch Theatre Company and The Everyman in association with Once Off Productions are delighted to present the Irish premiere of Caryl Churchill’s ESCAPED ALONE, at the Everyman Cork, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival 2025 (12 – 14 June) and at Project Arts Centre, Dublin from (19 – 28 June).

Revered playwright Caryl Churchill’s revolutionary play, Escaped Alone, viciously satirises contemporary capitalist culture while it celebrates the (often unheard) voices of aging women in this electric new production directed by Annabelle Comyn for Hatch Theatre Company. Intimate and vast, domestic and wild, Churchill’s vision presents a world hurtling towards its own destruction. 

Set in a suburban garden, the play alternates the chat of four elderly female friends with a set of monologues: three of the friends reveal to the audience their crippling anxieties, while the fourth, Mrs. Jarrett, narrates a contradictory and seemingly absurd, but all-too-plausible, set of apocalypses from which she has escaped. When Mrs Jarrett steps off the street and into Sally’s yard, her presence brings the outside world in and horrific events of the past, unspoken, emerge to the fore.

Escaped Alone explores the solace of community within which the older women’s individual feelings of ageing, and their relation to the world around them. It highlights the resilience, diplomacy and resolve needed to survive 70 years as a woman in a moribund and rapacious culture.

In a career spanning over six decades, playwright Caryl Churchill continues to reinvent the genre with each new creation. Escaped Alone staged its world premiere in 2016 at the Royal Court Theatre London. The play also made a U.S. debut at BAM, New York that following year (2017).

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.

With an all-star veteran cast of the best in Irish female actors including, Sorcha Cusack (whose numerous television credits include playing the title role in Jane Eyre, Casualty, Coronation Street and Father Brown); Anna Healy (Winner of Best Supporting Actress at the Irish Times Theatre Awards 2023) also known for her roles in ITV’s favourite soap, Emmerdale Farm; BBC’s hit TV series Showtrial (season 2) and RTE’s Fergus’s Wedding); Ruth McCabe (known for starring as Kay Curley in Stephen Frears' The Snapper; Christy Brown's paramour Mary in My Left Foot; and Wyn Ryan, sister of Dr. Sam Ryan, in three seasons of Silent Witness); and Deirdre Monaghan (known for screen roles in Game of Thrones (2011), Custer's Last Stand Up (2001) and My Norwegian Holiday (2023)).

“Escaped Alone is magnificent. It has all the qualities that mark Caryl Churchill as the greatest living playwright – it’s funny, it’s complicated, and it’s sinister.” – The Huffington Post

“Caryl Churchill’s magnificent new play unleashes an intricate, elliptical, acutely female view of the apocalypse. Revolutionary.” – The Observer, Susannah Clapp

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