Everything is endless when you’re in the heat of it.
For the first time, two of Caryl Churchill’s shorter plays have been taken on by director Sarah Frankcom and amalgamated into this cosmic, emotive exploration of life and death.
First up is Escaped Alone (2016), where the weight of the world is held in the spines of four ageing women, resting on deck chairs. As the daily concerns and happenings of these women hang on the fleeting clouds, their words become both their solace and their undoing.
Under a peaceful rhythm of birdsong and beating sun, these women in the winter of their life share an afternoon together. They gossip and talk of days gone by. As if struck by a discordant sound, Mrs. Jarrett, played by Maureen Beattie, enters.
Her arrival continuously interrupts the group. She floats around the sitting women, neurotic, anxious. All of a sudden, the sun dims and the spotlight beams on her as she lets us into her apocalyptic, ghostly musings about the future of our world. The script seamlessly shifts between the everyday, the domestic, the comfortable, to anxiety riddled monologues where walls of waves came from the sea and humorous, albeit terrifying, imaginings of wind being developed by property developers. Beattie’s performance was incredible; she embodied fear through face contortions and janky movements that shifted like tectonic plates between the everyday conversations of the other women.
On a rotating axis, each woman had her time in the sun, whilst the others sat in stasis. These transitions were perfectly executed; they were sudden, but they were also seamless. Sharing with others, but essentially bound to their own neuroses and worry, they stared intense phobias of cats, agoraphobia, and guilt in the face. Suspended in emotionally turbulent monologues before crashing back down to the earth, back on the artificial lawn, back in the heat of a summer afternoon. Tea and catastrophe.
Each actor held their own astoundingly, each exhibiting a different physical manifestation of anxiety and fear through their body language and command over the script. Churchill’s script is made for interruption, for one character’s speech to then be filled by another, and the rhythm that all four actors, Maureen Beattie, Margot Leicester, Annette Badland, and Souad Farress sustained made for truly transportive theatre. You hung on their every word.
Churchill’s radical decision to place older women, and their fears, on stage is honoured by director Sarah Frankcom, who managed their movements with subtlety. Like planets in orbit.
Next crept in Churchill’s What If, If Only (2021). During the interval, the setting is changed dramatically. The AstroTurf rises revealing a sunken floor where a liminal, lamplit living room appears.
For only thirty minutes, the audience was transported into a cosmic exploration of grief. Somebody (played by Danielle Henry) begins talking to her dead partner. Asking a series of mournful what if, if only questions, she pleads to be visited by her ghost, to be visited by a ‘wisp’ of memory.
Henry is a dynamic actor. She used hand gestures that grabbed emotion and laid it centre stage, for the audience to see, to feel. A masterful repetition of the question, ‘what if, if only,’ Henry’s movement shivered through the living room, bouncing between desperation and hopelessness.
Somebody is then visited by the first ghost, a returning Annette Badland, who plays one manifestation of the Future. Toying with Somebody’s grief and desperation to get their partner back, Future demands she looks at a future that could have been, a future that never will.
As if ghosts slithered into the walls of the theatre and slid on stage, countless other physical manifestations of potential futures are acted out by the Royal Exchange Elders company. A hauntingly brilliant ensemble, Somebody is surrounded by all the possible, pleading potentialities of the future. Grief is multi-dimensional, it’s here and it’s now, and it’s also nowhere.
The present, earthly and grounding, played by Lamin Touray, enters and forces Somebody to see where they are now. Their interaction is simple, but complex, much like the nature of grief, and both desperation and hope are distilled into their time together, in that lamp-lit living room.
The most astounding image, from an astounding play, is the echo that ran around the theatre as Somebody’s pain came to a close. ‘The future is going to happen,’ repeated by an unnamed child (Bea Glancy), Somebody turns the light out, picks up the memory box, and stares their future in the face. The future is going to happen.
Both plays stood as a microcosm of life and death. Tension is concentrated within the simplistic, naturalistic settings crafted by Rose Revitt, and the flawless lighting transitions by Bethany Gupwell. Frankcom’s astute interpretation of Churchill’s scripts amalgamated wonderfully with the actor’s considered, innovative, emotionally rich performances. I'm still left pondering on the nature of our existence.
Escaped Alone and What If, If Only is running until the 8th March. An excellent beginning to the Royal Exchange’s divine Spring Feminine which will be continued with Mike Leigh’s iconic contemporary classic, Kim’s Party, directed by Natalie Abrahami and starring Kym Marshall. For more information on either plays and how to get tickets, click here.
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