The Discreet Charm of Apocalypse: Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone at the Royal Court

Authors

  • Carlo Vareschi University of Verona

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13136/sjtds.v3i1.128

Keywords:

Churchill, Escaped Alone, Royal Court, dystopia, environment, Absurdism

Abstract

Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in January 2016 under the direction of James Macdonald, and was revived, at the same venue and with the same cast, between 25 January and 11 February 2017, before going on tour in the UK and USA. After a brief overview of Churchill’s latest production, I will focus on her preference for short theatrical forms as well as for environmental and eschatological themes. Escaped Alone will be briefly introduced in this frame, with a particular attention to its kinship with Far Away. The February 8 2017 performance will then be reviewed with regard to the text, the acting, and the stage design. Macdonald’s choices will be discussed, stressing the difficulties and the advantages of staging a play with minimal stage direction; Churchill’s relationship with the director, and her role in rehearsal and in the mise en scène will be considered too. Finally, I will suggest that Churchill, in her experimenting with theatrical language, has been distancing herself from her socialrealistic works of the Seventies and Eighties, going towards a theatre reminiscent of Absurdist theatre in general, and Samuel Beckett in particular.

Downloads

Published

2019-04-13

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 1 (2017)

Section

Special Section

License

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

This Journal is a CC-BY 4.0 publication (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This Licence allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this Journal, providing a link to the Licence and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).

  1.  The Author retains (i) the rights to reproduce, to distribute, to publicly perform, and to publicly display the Article in any medium for any purpose; (ii) the right to prepare derivative works from the Article; and (iii) the right to authorise others to make any use of the Article so long as the Author receives credit as Author and the Journal in which the Article has been published are cited as the source of first publication of the Article. For example, the Author may make and distribute copies in the course of teaching and research and may post the Article on personal or institutional Web sites and in other open-access digital repositories.
  2. The Author is free to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the Journal’s published version of the work, with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this Journal and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).
  3.  The Author is permitted and encouraged to post their work online after the evaluation process has been successfully passed, as it can lead to productive exchanges as well as to a wider dissemination of the published work.