In some ways I run into Mrs Jarrett all the time,” Helen Morse says of the character she plays in Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone. Heaven help you if you do run into a Mrs Jarrett type beside the picket fence. She may look harmless – until she rains apocalyptic hell down upon you while sipping her tea.
That’s how Churchill disarms you. With a grandmotherly presence juxtaposing the domestic and the epic, the play questions our lives and our politics with astonishing power.
Helen Morse is starring in Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone.Credit: Simon Schluter
Melbourne audiences will this month see a double bill of two very recent plays from Churchill, directed by MTC artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks. Churchill is one of Britain’s greatest playwrights, still creating work in her 80s. British critic Mark Lawson has called her later plays “stinging miniatures”. Concentrated and brutal, they don’t waste words; the 2021 play What If If Only, starring Alison Bell in the upcoming season, runs for just 20 minutes.
Escaped Alone premiered in 2016 and a five-star review of the London production was headlined “Small talk and everyday terror”. Grim black humour arrives in unexpected form – four older women chatting about their lives, their shops, their families and, abruptly, their deepest fears. Are they contented, troubled, nostalgic? Churchill gives little in the way of stage directions.
“They are all at least 70,” she writes of the friends, and they meet one sunny afternoon in a backyard. Mrs Jarrett doesn’t seem to know the others well. An outsider, she may be cosying up – until she erupts without warning into terrifying outbursts, be they revelations or visions, of global misery and collapse.
“Songs were sung until dry throats caused the end of speech … Torrential rain leaked through cracks and flooded the tunnels.”
A virus mutates, fires incinerate. Famine looms and survivors go insane. Then just as quickly in the backyard, chat resumes about Tesco and the fish and chip shop, the local dentist, what’s on the telly, kids are just glued to their phones these days.
The rarely interviewed Caryl Churchill in 2015.Credit: Marc Brenner
Morse is so petite and polite in conversation it’s hard to imagine her giving full-throated voice to such depravities, but she says she’s looking forward to performing in her first Churchill play. “Somehow Churchill finds a poetry in ordinary lives, and a most unusual surreal, almost absurdist poetry in Mrs Jarrett’s apocalyptic words,” she said. “She is compelled to tell these things, terrible things that are going to happen in the future – and these are things we see in the daily news, so many of these things are happening now.”
Every generation has its crises, of course, but post-2000, one senses Churchill sets out to goad and provoke us more than ever while dazzling an audience with language studded with imagery and menace.
Alison Bell and Helen Morse will star in the double bill of short plays by legendary playwright Caryl Churchill.Credit: Simon Schluter
Since the ferment of 1970s British theatre, she was often grouped with writers such as David Hare and Howard Brenton, politically charged figures influenced by social justice and feminism. Her acclaimed plays, including Top Girls and Serious Money, interrogate gender, Britain’s colonial past, market-driven greed and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. She’s had a long association with London’s Royal Court theatre, a renowned home for maverick voices, yet is famously reluctant to be interviewed by media.
The society she skewers over decades is one we recognise – but she makes it new through satire, inventive language and experimenting with non-naturalistic form.
“It’s been said that in every new play she finds a new form,” Morse says. “Certainly with this play what’s amazing is the way she structures the conversations between the women. They sometimes finish each other’s sentences. She’s mirroring the way human beings are. They’re reading each other’s subtext, and the precision of that is really so fine.”
Such inventiveness doesn’t make it easy for the cast. Escaped Alone is technically demanding, with written dialogue that lacks full stops, commas or ellipses.
“You have to work really slowly,” says Morse. “Still, you always know what she’s on about. She’s always concerned with the status of women on every level in society and the abuse of power, whether in a domestic situation or in global politics.
“A sense of menace is everywhere, in the domestic world and the global environment. She’s always felt strongly about rampant predator capitalism, the rapaciousness of those with power who remain oblivious to the suffering of those who have little.”
As one writer wrote of Churchill’s drama: “Home is not a safe place. It is a site of gothic collapse and psychic mayhem.”
Even on the sunny afternoon of Escaped Alone, hints of domestic violence seep into the chat; a killing, self-defence, prison, horrors that shadow a woman’s sunset years:
VI kitchen knife happened to be in my hand
LENA just bad luck really
No less frightening are the possible futures that appear in the shorter play What If If Only. Alison Bell found the mirth in motherhood in her television comedy The Letdown, but on stage she plays a woman grieving the death of a loved one. She yearns, as humans always have from ouija boards onwards, to receive a sign from the dead.
“Please, can you? Just a wisp would be fine. If you can, please. Please, I miss you. A small thing, just any small thing, let me know you’re there somewhere. If you can.”
“It’s heartbreaking and I think that’s what will connect with an audience, their own experiences of loss,” says Bell. “Death is utterly incomprehensible, so all the fictions or whatever people create for solace are completely understandable. The genius of this work is you see a woman reckoning with the fantasy of someone returning. I think all of us might go through that. Wanting it back and having to face reality and coming to some sort of resolution of how to go on – that’s what’s cathartic and hopeful about this piece.”
The bereaved lover is visited by some kind of personifications of the choices we make – political, emotional, environmental. The ghostly presences are Present and Future – alternate what-ifs that lie in all of our hands. Personally and globally, we’re asked: will we heed the warnings?
“You’d have tigers and coral … if only you hadn’t driven and guzzled and poisoned me,” says one possible future.
“There’s a sense of caution,” says Bell. “When she’s contending with the Present, he says of the futures ‘be careful, some of them bite’. I think that’s important – don’t just get swept along, don’t just take whatever future walks through the door. Find out what they’re going to be. I think that’s timely for all of us. Don’t just let the future happen. Choose it.”
Bell was drawn to the humour and the shared project of choosing the “right” way forward. “There’s an extraordinary speech about something that’s much bigger than us, that’s political, that’s about social equality; and I share that perspective with Churchill, that the personal is political. It all trickles down and the culture invades the home and affects our relationships.”
Despite the grief awaiting us all, she laughs heartily when bringing up her favourite line in the play. Churchill distils one promised utopia as: “equality and cake and no bad bits at all”.
Finally, a cosy manifesto. Says Bell: “Equality and cake – I crave nothing more than those things!”
Escaped Alone and What If If Only are at Southbank Theatre, The Sumner, from August 7 to September 9. www.mtc.com.au