Preview: Escaped Alone, Bristol Old Vic

Four older women sit on the stage in garden chairs cradling cups of tea. The blood-lust comes as a bit of a surprise.

Caryl Churchill’s new play Escaped Alone explores the loneliness and invisibility of the elderly – yet it’s also about the full lives these women have led. The secrets they’ve kept, the people they’ve lost. It grows in absurdity and darkness, twisting in ways at once surprising from the apparent civility of the set, and yet entirely expected from Churchill’s twisted pen. “It’s almost a piece of magic,” says associate director Stella Powell-Jones.

Mrs Jarrett (Linda Bassett) spies her neighbours chatting through a garden fence. They call to her to join them. In her new play, directed by James Macdonald, Churchill lifts the fence and allows us into the conversation between these witty female friends.

Pics: Johan Persson

Churchill states that the cast are all at least 70 years old. Powell-Jones is reluctant to focus on the actors’ age, but at a time when older women are rarely seen on our stages, it is difficult not to think that Churchill is making a point. Bassett is joined by Deborah Findlay, Kika Markham and June Watson as Sally, Lena and Vi. “It is a real treat to get to work with people who are just so extraordinarily talented, and actors I have admired for a long time,” Powell-Jones says. “Their age is the least interesting thing about them.”

Conversation between the women crosses from jokes to family drama, swooping over TV and pausing for a moment on prison. Lines are broken and interrupted in the dialogue, as the flow of a line is a surfed wave that quickly crashes into sharp rocks.

Mrs Jarrett steps outside. In a flickering frame of red light, she describes a dead fuse, a broken screen, a warning message. Middle-class issues chime with grotesque images of the near future. She comments on today’s society, the things we’re preoccupied with and the ridiculousness of the 21st century. Some observations feel too close to what is happening today, while others seem so fantastical the audience can’t stop giggling.

She talks of rations and sex, gas masks and death. “Only when cooking shows were overtaken by sex with football teams did cream trickle back to the shops and rice was airlifted again.” Mrs Jarrett’s monologues are a spoken-word Black Mirror, Churchill’s vision as humorous as it is repulsive.

Powell-Jones explains that the flickering red lights are “useful to carve up the space”. The text of these catastrophic technology scenes draws on real-life examples, with exaggerations and added gruesome details. However, in this era of disease, technology and corruption, Powell-Jones says, “a lot [of Churchill’s examples] aren’t really dystopian – unless we’re already in the dystopia.”

The dark grit comes as a surprise in the otherwise fairly gentle performance, and it is these off-balance moments that are so delicious. The most memorable scene comes with Mrs Jarrett’s outburst of frustration towards the end of the play. In her outcry of a “terrible rage”, she provides women with a platform to be angry and vocal, something so rarely seen without being attributed to hysteria. This is justified, logical, pure anger. It feels slightly heroic to watch.

Pics: Johan Persson

In just 50 minutes, Powell-Jones says, Escaped Alone “packs the whole human experience in”. These international horrors Mrs Jarrett describes are just as much a part of our day, she argues, as “sitting and having a cup of tea with your friends.” It is as if the world in lights is the front page headlines of every newspaper read out over breakfast, conglomerated into one awful, hideous snowball and thrown hard into Mrs Jarrett’s mouth.

Powell-Jones has been rehearsing the play for the New York run at the beginning of this year, and the subsequent UK tour. She is excited to see how it is received in Bristol as regional touring is “so fundamental. It’s wonderful to be in New York and in another country, but I think we’ll learn more from getting to see it in different part of the UK.” She adds that the show should resonate anywhere: “It is not about London or a capital city, it’s about four humans coming together.”

Churchill’s newest play is a snippet of sharp writing, commenting on our understanding of the ageing population, and on our own developing dystopia.

Escaped Alone is at Bristol Old Vic from Wednesday, March 22 to Sunday, March 26. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.bristololdvic.org.uk/escapedalone.html