Cork Midsummer Festival 2025: Escaped Alone

Ruth McCabe, Sorcha Cusack, Deirdre Monaghan and Anna Healy in Escaped Alone, by Caryl Churchill. Image, Ros Kavanagh

****

In Caryl Churchill's dystopian satire Escaped Alone, the world is gone to hell, but as long as there’s friendship there's hope. Particularly the friendship shared by women. The civilised chitchat sitting on chairs under a tree, the grass under your feet as the sun journeys across the sky. Tom Piper’s colouring book set, illuminated perfectly by SJ Shiels, an island of green in a cartoon universe offering an oasis of connection. Perhaps a park, a garden, or a retirement home. Or a spacecraft carrying the last survivors of humanity as the sun sets through its large, oval window. Or just an ordinary day in some ordinary place with ordinary women talking of ordinary things. Only this is Caryl Churchill where language renders the ordinary extraordinary as stories within the story take shape. Director Annabelle Comyn making strong, compelling choices, not least in her casting of some of the prize jewels of Irish Theatre.

Like Eliot's The Wasteland, or Piper’s superb set, Escaped Alone resists easy interpretation. Efforts to nail it definitely to the ground likely to miss something vital. The only response being to yield to its riches in which the truth transcends the limits of facts or words. Even as language is the thing that gives everything substance. Conversations ranging from TV plots to capitalism find three women, Vi, Sally and Ruth, joined by a fourth, Mrs Jarrett, who frequently breaks from their shared conversation to deliver rapid fire monologues. Anna Healy’s energised Mrs Jarrett wielding poetry to craft metaphors and images of a world destroying itself. Returning to join the women where deeper truths are revealed in shared conversation and in each woman’s brief monologue. Discussing the world, their plight, or singing and clapping like vibrant young girls. Ruth McCabe Vi’s recounting time served for manslaughter, Sorcha Cusack’s Sally loathing rats, cats and pigeons, Deirdre Monaghan‘s Lena deepening her separation of public and private. Each delighting in a superb, understated production whose simplicity belies its underlying power.

Anna Healy in Escaped Alone, by Caryl Churchill. Image, Ros Kavanagh

Escaped Alone might be set in a park, but it’s not always a walk in the park. Rich in cultural and societal references, many twisted into thought provoking metaphors, Churchill’s script makes for challenging going at times. But Comyn teases it into something hugely accessible, honouring the text by leaning into the relationship between the women. Marshalling a strong cast, Comyn realises a solid vision. It might not be everyone’s idea of presenting Churchill, but it’s one that stands its ground, honours its source, and one you’re unlikely to forget.

Escaped Alone, by Caryl Churchill, presented by Hatch Theatre Company and The Everyman in association with Once Off Productions, ran at The Everyman as part of Cork Midsummer Festival 2025.

It transfers to Project Arts Centre Dublin, June 19 - 28.

For more information visit Cork Midsummer Festival 2025 or Project Arts Centre