Review: Escaped Alone, Coronet Theatre 

There are few writers with the skill of Caryl Churchill, whose unique imagination and creativity offers profound yet accessible insight into politics and the human condition. At the Coronet Theatre her 2016 play Escaped Alone, produced by lacasadargilla & Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, still impacts chillingly as it plays with ideas of domestic serenity whilst the world slides into catastrophic decline. With Churchill’s exceptional text necessarily doing some heavy lifting, this multi-layered, sleekly constructed production adds a bitingly sharp and current edge.   

The setting is a quintessential country garden, with a table set for tea. Except it’s not exactly that: Marco Rossi and Francesca Sgariboldi’s double-take set design includes labyrinthine hedges crafted apparently from bin bags; the lawn is artificial Astro-turf, damaged and punctured. A huge screen dominates the space above, relocating the natural world and its dazzling sunsets into a place of artifice and capitalism, as they are projected along with images of AI and corporate towers. This is a space where human existence with nature is compromised. And with the title of the play being a Biblical quotation from the Book of Job (1:15), spoken by the sole survivor of a catastrophe, there’s a real sense that we are in the end days.  

Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli and Alessandro Ferroni’s direction is slick and revealing throughout. As the performers enter, time and space are immediately made questionable. They negotiate the stage at different proximities – forward, back, to the side, while retro music conflicts with the huge, modern technological presence. Shifting lighting states reimagine their superficially chintzy world as they drift between the delightful and the deeply dark and absurd. The performance is presented in Italian with English surtitles, screens giving dynamic presence to Churchill’s impressively lyrical language and cementing the concept of multiple dimensions in language and understanding. 

Despite the disrupted environment, four old ladies sit sipping tea, determinedly chatting about grandchildren. They’re comic in their lively stereotypes, overlapping sentences, yanking on their tights – one hilariously overwhelmed by a fear of cats. The group display huge vitality and positivity as they make Bloody Marys live on stage and share a chorus of ‘Teen Spirit’, but this is undermined when murder is revealed and visceral, reverberating soliloquies suggest the horrific detail of a post-apocalyptic world that offers commentary on the choices of today. Throughout there’s universality fused into the artifice of their shared, localised domesticity which discloses a broader human denial of a world sliding unchecked into peril.  

Caterina Carpio, Tania Garribba, Arianna Gaudio and Alice Palazzi make up a talented ensemble cast, working superbly to deliver a range of comedy, horror and impactful vulnerability. It’s important that the voices of older women are heard and the resilience of age made visible, so it seems a disappointing choice that the performers themselves are only made up to be elderly. In some ways this duality of presentation reflects on the ideas of past and present embodied simultaneously and underscores the characters’ futile determination to remain playfully youthful, but it’s hard not to consider it a slight misfire. 

The detail of the production is superb, with pathos visualised in the kindness of a chocolate bar proffered to a murderer, and complicity made visible through a selfie with a screened sunset. It defies us to accept knowledge we already have about the world we live in and how we live in it, even as we find moments of mutual connection and joy in the overwhelming awareness of accelerating crisis. Yet it prompts urgent reconsideration of inaction. This is a dexterously challenging interpretation of a play that stands the test of time when time is running out. 

Written by Caryl Churchill 
Translated by Monica Capuani 
A project by lacasadargilla 
Directed by Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli and Alessandro Ferroni 
Dramaturgy by Margherita Mauro 
Soundscapes and scenic concept by Alessandro Ferroni 
Movement dramaturgy by Marta Ciappina 
Set design by Marco Rossi and Francesca Sgariboldi 
Visual environment/image dramaturgy by Maddalena Parise 
Lighting dramaturgy by Luigi Biondi 
Lighting adaptation for London by Omar Scala 
Costumes by Anna Missaglia 
Produced by Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa, Teatro di Roma – Teatro Nazionale 

Escaped Alone runs at Coronet Theatre until Saturday 9 May.