The Plays: Escaped Alone and What If If Only by Caryl Churchill
The Theatre: The Southbank Theatre
The Company: The Melbourne Theatre Company
Stars: Escaped Alone - 3.5 What If/If Only 4
Until 9 September
Two short plays, loosely based on the theme of grief, on in one night. Sounds like a treat?
Yeah... Nah.
The jury is still out on this offering from the Melbourne Theatre Company, which showed two of Caryl Churchill's more recent short plays.
And they are not bad. But they're not going to be to everybody's tastes.
First up came Escaped Alone.
According to the MTC website, "In Escaped Alone, a woman joins her three neighbours for an afternoon of swapping memories and sharing secrets, in between the telling of catastrophic events, bleak but blackly humorous."
The staging is a bit in your face. Similar to 2.22: A Ghost Story, the effect of using loud screams and black outs grew a bit tiresome after a while - but it did give the breaks required between takes.
Helen Morse plays Mrs Jarrett, who stumbles into a garden and starts up a discussion with her neighbours, Vi (Deborah Lawrence), Lena (Kate Hood) and Sally (Deirdre Rubenstein). The women discuss life, the universe and lots of things, all with an overtone of some sort of recent apocalypse. And that's about it.
What I did like was the company has taken Caryl Churchill's stage directions to heart and employed four of Melbourne's septuagenarian actresses to play these roles, all of which in some ways morph into one.
Churchill often writes her plays without punctuation or stage directions, but the actors have done well to get what they have out of the text. Saying this, I did fall asleep for a couple of minutes, but I don't think I missed much. The near stream of consciousness way of the play meant not having to be on point.
It reminded me a bit of Samuel Becket's works, if not a little more approachable.
After a short interval, came What If If Only. Another meditation on grief.
Alison Bell plays S, a woman who is barely containing her grief for her lost partner. The MTC website describe it as "... a partner laments their lost love and conjures up countless possible futures, with and without love." These futures come to visit her over the 30 minutes of the play.
I much preferred the second play. Topical, relevant and interesting. The first play took a bit more to get into, but I did enjoy seeing some of Australia's Master actors on stage. In both works, the characters’ hopes, fears and dreams are palpable, visceral and remarkable.
These plays aren't for everybody. Some may even describe them as a lighter, feminised version of a Samuel Becket play. And yes, Anne-Louise Sark's direction is on point for most of it, and I loved Marg Horwell's sets.
For this effort, I'm filing it under, approach with caution. I enjoyed the concept. Many other's won't.
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