Linda Bassett, Deborah Findlay, Kika Markham, and June Watson
at the Royal Court
Photo by Johan Persson
030 – Escaped Alone by Caryl Churchill
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The setting seems ordinary enough. Four women of a certain age sitting in a suburban garden chatting over tea. They talk of the usual things: children and grandchildren, the local shops, the latest TV series and the jobs they used to do. But each of them harbours darker thoughts that simmer below the social surface, prompting moments of private or sometimes more public anxiety.
The peace of these scenes in the garden is even more disturbed when from time-to-time one of the women steps away from the others to tell us about shocking, even surreal, disasters that have struck the world. What world is she describing? How does she know about what she is telling us? Is it some warning about an apocalypse to come?
This is the unsettling yet unforgettable dramatic landscape of Caryl Churchill’s stunning play Escaped Alone. The play was first produced at the Royal Court Theatre in 2016, and was revived again in 2017 with the same cast, before transferring to New York. This is the first Caryl Churchill play that we’ve covered, and I’m delighted finally to be doing one of her titles, not least because in our play poll listeners and guests have recommended Caryl Churchill more than any other author. Her body of work contains many of the most innovative works in the catalogue of modern drama. She is renowned for her relentless experimentation in form, as well as her political consciousness and the precise poetry of her language. Her work has an unfailing power to dramatize the anxieties that dominate our contemporary world, and in the case of Escaped Alone to present an extraordinarily prophetic vision of a world overcome by collective disaster.
I’m joined in this episode by an expert in Caryl Churchill’s work, Elaine Aston. Elaine is a Professor at the Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University, and the author of two books on the work of Caryl Churchill.
The film production of Escaped Alone will be streamed online at 7:30 pm each evening for five nights from 2-6 September 2021. Click here to purchase tickets from the Teddington Theatre Club.
Elaine Aston
Elaine Aston is a Professor at the Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University, and the author of a monograph on Caryl Churchill which she has updated in three editions published by Northcote House, as well as the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill and the Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights from Cambridge University Press. Elaine is acclaimed for her work on theatre research and feminism, publishing several books on Feminist Theatre Practice, and currently serves as the President of the International Federation for Theatre Research.
Recommended Play
Elaine recommended Hang by debbie tucker green.
The Footnotes to our episode on Caryl Churchill’s prophetic play Escaped Alone include further thoughts on Churchill’s uncanny prescience, as well as some background on the experience of filming the play during lockdown.
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115 – The Dance of Death by August Strindberg
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August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death is set in a remote army base on the coast of Sweden, where an army captain and his wife are trapped together in an unhappy marriage. The captain, bitter at his lack of promotion, and his wife, frustrated at having been forced to give up her career as an actress, occupy their empty hours tearing into each other in a brutal dance of mutual cruelty.
Strindberg’s scorching portrait of marital strife was written in 1900, but has had a lasting influence. Arthur Miller dubbed Strindberg, “the mad inventor of modern theatre”, and echoes of his unflinching dissection of marital discord can be seen in the plays of Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and John Osborne.
Sir Richard Eyre adapted and directed a wonderful production of Dance of Death at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames earlier this year, and I am delighted that Sir Richard joins me in this episode to guide us through Strindberg’s blistering onslaught on marriage.
114 – Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
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William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost is described on the title page in the first publication of its text in 1598 as “A Pleasant Conceited Comedie.” I imagine that the epithets were intended to highlight the play’s courtly aesthetic, its frothy merry-go-round of courtship, and above all perhaps, its ostentatiously intricate word play. For it is a play rich in the love and perils of language.
I am joined to assay Shakespeare’s conceited comedy by the Artistic Director of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames, Tom Littler. In the summer of 2026 Tom adapted and directed a magical double bill of Shakespeare, producing Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing in repertory, and staging them both ‘en plein air’.
113 – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
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Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia, is viewed by many as his finest play, renowned for the breadth of its intellectual interrogations and its formal invention. The play is a structural masterpiece of ideas, as well as a teasing detective story, joyous comedy, and emotionally rich exploration of love and loss.
As we record this episode a wonderful new production of Arcadia is playing at the Duke of York’s theatre in London’s West End, following its acclaimed run at the Old Vic theatre earlier this year. I am delighted to share the challenge and the pleasure of exploring Stoppard’s dazzling drama with the director of the new production, Carrie Cracknell.
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