Four women, all over 70, sit in a garden chatting about this and that. Sporadically, one of them recounts details of plagues, famines, the breakdown of communities and other environmental catastrophes.
This is the substance of 'Escaped Alone', Caryl Churchill's 2016 play which Teddington Theatre Club has adapted into a film to be streamed online between 2nd and 6th September.
Director Danny Wain spoke to me about the production.
For those who don't know the text, what happens in 'Escaped Alone'?
Everything and nothing. Four women chat about shops closing, weddings and so on. Although there's very little drama, the play places the humdrum alongside the apocalyptic.
What attracted you to filming the play?
Partly because older women are an overlooked demographic in the theatre and in life; partly because it's inherently filmic – it's a chamber-piece featuring four ladies and a single set.
It's also remarkably prescient with its accounts of death and destruction: one speech, for instance, concerns the outbreak of a virus.
Caryl Churchill is both widely acclaimed but somehow still under-appreciated – she isn't a household name in the way that certain other contemporary dramatists are. How so?
She is under-appreciated. I don't know how much that's because she's a woman and how much it's because her plays are political. I've known some people who think Churchill is 'too clever by half'!
Perhaps you have to have a certain receptiveness to absurdist drama or to agit-prop theatre to really connect with her plays?
She's very Brechtian at times. She doesn't offer easy reading or viewing. Whereas Douglas, the assistant-director already loved it, the play grew on me over time. One of the most fun things about rehearsals was going through the text line-by-line and working out what each utterance means to each character.
Do you think of it as a didactic play?
In some ways. It's certainly saying that humanity is screwing up the planet for future generations and we're just sitting by.
However, it also leaves the audience the opportunity to interpret the action as they wish. For instance, Douglas believed Mrs Jarrett [the character whose monologues voice the play's apocalyptic scenarios] to be a ghost. My view was that she is recounting catastrophes that have come after the garden scene and she is, perhaps, the only survivor – hence the play's title.
Could you see the play as mocking our fondness for pessimism – a kind of lazy fatalism that can function as a perverse source of comfort?
Possibly – but I actually think it's quite an optimistic play. The four women are survivors and chatting in the garden is the way we get through that hardship: that's our coping mechanism.
Did you encourage the actors to endow the characters with specific personal histories?
Yes. Sally and Vi, for instance, clearly come from different class-backgrounds. We thought a lot about the four characters' relationships with men, too – we agreed, for example, that one of them was a widow – and generally spent time considering their hinterlands. It was interesting to watch the actors reading lines in ways that made sense to them in terms of the backgrounds they had created for each character.
Were there creative challenges involved in filming it?
Yes – this isn't a filming of a stage-play! We worked with a professional production crew to make it as filmic as possible. I changed the layout of the set and encouraged the actors to forget that they were in a theatre building, moving them away from the big gestures that you might make when 'playing out' on stage.
Escaped Alone streams live between 2nd September and 6th September at 7.30pm.
If you're a student aged 16-18 and want to try your hand as a theatre critic, Teddington Theatre Club is running a competition to find the best review of their production of Escaped Alone. Follow the link below for details.
Comments