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Show: Escaped Alone
Society: Rushen Players
Venue: Gaiety Theatre, Isle of Man
Credits: By Caryl Churchill
Type: Sardines
Author: Paul Johnson
Performance Date: 29/03/2024
Escaped Alone
Paul Johnson | 31 Mar 2024 14:12pm
Photos: Paul Johnson
Escaped Alone is an absurdist play. There are no two ways about it. What’s more you can read all kinds of weird and wonderful things said of it in terns of a drama. People will make up all sorts of reasons to write snobby things praising it just because it’s written by one of our leading playwrights, Caryl Churchill. Well I don’t like it as a piece of drama. There, I said it.
It’s being entered into the Isle of Man’s one act Play Festival my the Island’s Rushen Players. The only flore is pretty big risk. This is what the MADF website says about the play: “Tea and catastrophe! Caryl Churchill’s convention-defying play mixes backyard tea with environmental disaster, exploring themes of politics, crisis, communic ation and female endurance. This pleasant conversation is frequently interrupted by the neighbour, Mrs Jarrett, who stands to address the audience for long monologues about an apocalyptic world.” The play is labelled as a black comedy, they goethat right! I honestly can’t say fairer than that because the audience didn’t understand it. But we do know that it’s set in the garden. It’s summer, it’s bright and warm. What I can make out is one of the women is obsessed with hating cats. One tells how lonely she is, one talks about the holocaust and the other one talks at length about a knife and a husband,
Basically, the idea is to frighten whichever audience it plays to. What actually happens is the audience switches off and stops listening.
Oh dear!