Escaped Alone is Churchill at her surrealist best

Maybe Caryl Churchill should be worried. The past 14 months have seen a mass excavation of her earlier work, with four of her works being produced in the UK. From Maxine Peake’s tongue-twisting turn in The Skriker, a highlight of the Manchester International Festival, to the National Theatre’s double bill of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Here We Go, Churchill’s work has been granted an attention normally reserved for the recently deceased.

But she is alive and kicking at 77 years of age, still preoccupied with fragile mortality, as evidenced by her newest work, Escaped Alone, currently showing at the Royal Court. In her typically blunt style, the play is a trim 50 minutes long, although within that time she manages to pack in more questions and concepts than most playwrights do with twice the length. Well into her fifth decade of writing, Churchill’s advancing age is perhaps reflected in the choice of cast: four women who are all described in the script as ‘at least seventy’.

Such a combination is incredibly rare in theatre (indeed, in any art form), and it seems that the four leads are all ready to prove themselves, putting in electrifying performances: Deborah Findlay is Sally, an ex-medic with a pathological fear of cats; Kika Markham bends her body into a rigid ball of energy as the nervy Lena, who suffers from depression and agoraphobia; June Watson hardens herself as the ex-con, possible murderer Vi; and Linda Bassett puts in a barnstorming performance as Mrs Jarrett, the neighbour who encroaches on the trio, and is as a result inevitably on the periphery.

Churchill explores the space between sentimental unexamined domesticity and a void of existential horror

The four women sit in the garden during a warm afternoon, and drink tea, that most parochial and cosy of commodities, one whose inoffensive charm rests upon a foundational history of colonial expansion, oppressive empire, and the slave trade. It is this space, between a sentimental unexamined domesticity and a void of existential horror, that Churchill inhabits with her work; indeed, this dichotomy is expanded upon quite literally, as the green lawn intermittently gives way to a blank nether-world, where Mrs Jarrett relays stark messages of disaster upon disaster. Is it a prophecy? A warning? Nothing is certain. Designer Peter Mumford’s lighting is brutal – a coil of metal wire glows around the periphery of the stage, like a coiled filament of an incandescent bulb, or the familiar orange flame of a toaster, only any warmth is snuffed out by its scale, as thoughts of home comforts spill over into industrial wastes.

Jarrett’s descriptions of the bleak future are delivered with an abruptness that is by turns comic and desolating. From a tale involving food stocks being diverted into television programmes, allowing starving commuters to watch breakfast on iPlayer, to a man-made landslide that buries villagers, with fragments of rock landing ‘onto the designated child’s head’, Churchill’s text is a relentless take-down of modernity. With mentions of property developers, laptop cancers, and poisonous sugar, a comparison could be made with Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series, although Churchill’s ideas are more refined and abstract, bracing in their meaningless surrealism. Her penchant for chaos seems instead to draw on the work of speculative writers, especially J. G. Ballard’s themes of social isolation and resolution through turmoil.

Her writing, as well, continues to develop. Escaped Alone is full of phrases that stick in your mind, swirling round and round like an icy mist – ‘the chemicals leaked through cracks in the money,’ ‘children fell asleep in class and didn’t wake up.’ At points, she takes both the language and the performers to their limit, with a monologue delivered by Findlay at a breakneck speed rivalling Beckett’s Not I for its poetic lyricism. Churchill leads us, as an audience, up to a point where language begins to fracture, revealing its complete, abstracted, quicksilver character.

The repetitious nature of Mrs Jarrett’s interspersions, of which there are seven, begin to suffer from familiarity towards the end of the play, and nothing feels as gripping as when she first steps from the garden into the black wastes. But still, this is some of Churchill’s most clear-cut, daring writing to date; the scenes in the garden, which sizzle with a charged undercurrent of unease and neglect, are beautiful in their awkward terror.

The French philosopher Simone Weil wrote that loving one’s fellow man is merely a question of asking ‘what is your torment?’ Escaped Alone offers us the opportunity to simply listen, and try and unpick the rotting agony lying just underneath the skin of her four leads. It is an unsettling, brilliant work; we have more to fear from Mrs Jarrett’s prophesies than from the thought that Churchill could – after fifty years – be losing her brutally-cold force.

At the Royal Court till 12 March.