Escaped Alone:In Brief
Caryl Churchill: Escaped Alone
Ahead of lacasadargilla and Piccolo Teatro’s production of Escaped Alone, here’s a brief introduction to the play, the work of Caryl Churchill, the people behind this extraordinary staging.
The Play
Written in 2016 by the English playwright Caryl Churchill, Escaped Alone tells the story of three friends – Sally, a retired doctor with a deep-set fear of cats, Vi, an ex-hairdresser who has served time, and Lena, an agoraphobic lover of TV series – sitting in the garden of one of the three, deep in conversation over a meandering range of topics. A fourth woman, Mrs Jarrett, is passing by and decides to join them. Over the course of a summer afternoon – one that appears to be a representation of all the others – considerations, fears and episodes of apparent normality are interspersed with apocalyptic monologues in which Mrs Jarrett describes a future (or is it a present?) in which the entire human race is sliding into an abyss with the same calm with which one pours a cup of tea…
Caryl Churchill
Caryl Churchill was born in London in 1938. After graduating in English literature from Oxford, she began working as a radio and television writer for the BBC. She had her first theatrical successes at the end of the 1950s, and in 1972 made her stage debut in 1972 at the Royal Court Theatre, an institution that she would remain tied to for the rest of her artistic career. In her more than forty works, Churchill takes on a wide range of mainly political and social themes: the pitfalls of the family, the deepening of inequalities, the evermore pressing question of immigration and the inevitable conflicts that it leads to, and a growing worry over the plundering of the Earth’s resources and for the effects of climate change.
The Title
The title of the work and of the play is a quotation from the bible, Job 1:15, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee”. The same phrase is also present in the epilogue to Moby Dick by Hermann Melville, when Ishmael, the narrator of the entire story of the battle between Captain Ahab and the white whale, tells how he was miraculously saved following the sinking of the Pequod and lived to tell the tale.
Lacasadargilla
The themes and the language adopted by contemporary English playwriting are in particular harmony with the sensibilities of lacasadargilla ensemble, which has, over the years, staged – among others – Lear by Edward Bond, the award-winning When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell, and L’amore del cuore (Heart’s Desire), again by Caryl Churchill. A collective of artists and associate of the Piccolo, in 2023 lacasadargilla staged Anatomia di un suicidio by Alice Birch, produced by the Milanese theatre, with which it won five Ubu awards and filled the Teatro Grassi for two consecutive seasons.
Practical info
The duration of the play is one hour and fifteen minutes without intermission, is presented in Italian with English surtitles, and there are only five performances to catch it.