Escaped Alone: The genie out of the bottle
This 2016 play announced the beginning of our current doomer era. Has it gotten darker?
Project Arts Centre - Space Upstairs, Dublin
★★★★☆
How do you imagine the end of the world? Each era has its own apocalyptic visions: the twisted souls of Gislebertus’s Last Judgement; the medieval, planet-destroying ritual of Scriabin’s Mysterium; the paranoid delusions of a Cold War general – setting the world on a path of mutually-assured nuclear destruction – in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
You can pinpoint the beginning of our current pessimistic period. Nearly a decade ago, we witnessed a boom of theatre and TV dystopias, inspired by depressing resonances of fascism and irreversible changes to the climate, that may have worked like roundabout confrontations with the anxieties of our own reality. In early 2016, Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone arrived, shortly before the flood. It may have been a quiet announcement of the noise to follow.
A curtain swishes open to reveal a back garden, a neat patch of green covered in sunshine, where a trio of retired women have gathered. “Don’t look now but someone’s watching us,” somebody says. One of them recognises the looker-on as Mrs. Jarret – a mysterious figure carrying a black plastic bag, dressed for the hot day in a cigar-brown hoody, and, in Anna Healy’s curious expression, seems anxious to sit among them.