Kyra Harper, Brenda Robins, Clare Coulter, and Maria Vacratsis in Escaped Alone.
- Title: Escaped Alone
- Written by: Caryl Churchill
- Genre: Drama
- Director: Jennifer Tarver
- Actors: Clare Coulter, Kyra Harper, Brenda Robins, Maria Vacratsis
- Company: Soulpepper and Necessary Angel
- Venue: Young Centre for the Performing Arts
- City: Toronto
- Year: Runs to November 25, 2018
Drag & drop rating element here
At age 76, Clare Coulter is still one of Caryl Churchill’s top girls.
A reminder that the Canadian actress is a brilliant interpreter of the words of the great British apocalypticist playwright is currently on stage at Toronto’s Soulpepper in the form of director Jennifer Tarver’s production of Escaped Alone.
Coulter won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for her performance in the Canadian premiere of Ms. Churchill’s Top Girls back in 1984; I would not be surprised if her otherworldly work in this new Churchill play wins her another a quarter century on.
In Escaped Alone, Coulter plays an oracular pensioner named Mrs. Jarrett who visits three other women for tea and a chat.
During monologues that interrupt their conversation about television series' and changes to shops on the local high street, Mrs. Jarrett goes off into strange reveries about the end of the world – which is either coming, or has already taken place, or perhaps is happening again and again.
She speaks in deadpan of children falling asleep in class and never waking up, of waves destroying cities, of some dying from thirst while others die of drinking the water. While these speeches are dreadful, they are also at times droll – as when Mrs Jarrett tells of a reality television program where the winner gets to be the last human to consume edible food.
While Coulter’s delivery is always serious, what she’s saying can seem like a stand-up routine that’s gone seriously off the rails.
Ms. Churchill’s writing in Escaped Alone is evocative and intriguing and leaves much to the imagination – and what’s incredible about Coulter’s performance is how it sucks the audience into her imagination through her feline eyes. All the answers and the details left out of this mysterious script seem to be hiding in there.
In the stylized small talk Mrs. Jarrett shares with three other women (played by Kyra Harper, Brenda Robins and Maria Vacratsis), Coulter is astonishingly alive in both her listening and her interjections. A deep laugh that comes out of her is somehow shocking, and yet entirely natural upon further reflection. (And her British accent is the best and most unaffected you’ve ever heard from a Canadian actor.)
When her friends break into a rendition of Manfred Mann’s Do Wah Diddy Diddy, Coulter’s Mrs. Jarrett gives the impression that she’s an alien trying to pretend to be a human; a moment later, however, she seems to be the only human on the stage surrounded by aliens.
With this late-career play, Ms. Churchill, considered by some to be the U.K.’s greatest living playwright, has composed a short quartet, with a series of solos, for the end of time, with older women at its centre. What is the play about though? An apocalypse, or the way aging approximates one on the personal level?
The conversational elements are not always satisfying in Tarver’s production, staged in between two risers of seats. (Tarver’s Necessary Angel company is co-producer with Soulpepper.) The half-finished sentences can feel stilted rather than stylish – like someone’s unleashed a weed-whacker on the script.
But the monologues are marvellous all around. Vacratsis has a tremendous one about an all-consuming fear of cats that’s like a book written by Dr. Seuss in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Harper has a depressed one that drifts into an uncanny self-consciousness: “Why open your mouth and do talking?” And Robins is moving as a woman who has an actual plot line – having spent six years in prison for a crime she’s still mulling over in horror.
Teresa Przybylski’s set, a flock of paper birds or bats or fighter planes hanging over the four actresses, captures the play’s playful indeterminacy perfectly. The lighting by Jennifer Lennon and sound design by Verne Good is at times very precise – and at others unnervingly haphazard; again, very Churchillian.
But the main attraction of Escaped Alone is Coulter in her element, one of the great actors of her generation, or any other.
J. Kelly Nestruck