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MARIKO HORI TANAKA
dementia and the lack of admiration for his honorable life in his younger days.
Their condolences sound meaningless, or even convey malice in their lack of
memories of the deceased. The second scene of this play, particularly the latter
half focusing on the dead person’s speech, is more like Beckett: the person, no
longer alive but still hanging on to this world, wonders where he or she is stuck,
pondering whether hell exists now when the real world for the living is hellish.
The whole speech by this person is spoken very fast, as if the character is unable
to stop, which resembles Beckett’s Mouth in Not I or the three characters in
Play. In Escaped Alone, a more realistic play — in the sense that its setting is a
friendly gathering of four women who chat over tea in a small British middle¬
class town — each of the women, in the middle of their conversation, gives an
inner monologue that is cut into the play and spoken while the other women
are either in tableau or hidden in a dark space. The inner monologue of Mrs
Jarrett, one of the four, is spoken on a darkened stage, alone, separate from
the tea gathering scenes; the monologue scene is inserted after each tea scene,
and there are seven scenes of Mrs Jarrett’s speech, which reflects Churchill’s
dystopian, apocalyptic view of the world’s future.
Asearly asin such works as The Skriker (1994) and Far Away (2000), Churchill
inserted similar dystopian apocalyptic fantasy into her fragmented dialogue.
Her later dramatic works reveal the danger of apocalyptic annihilation caused
by the indifference of some political leaders toward a future world controlled
by men. Her Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2006), for example, satirizes
George W. Bush and Tony Blair, who pushed for the invasion of Iraq in 2003,
by depicting their intimate relationship as one of homosexual love. This is a
two-man play in which a tyrant (the American president), who boasts about his
intervention in other countries’ civil wars, disgusts his lover (the British prime
minister), who, after emotional turmoil, leaves him in the end. If this play is
about top world leaders, then Escaped Alone is about four old women who
have never been nor ever will be in such a spotlight. However, the four women
sitting in chairs facing the audience look just like “a sexually reversed photo
of world leaders. Instead of a crowd of men and Angela Merkel in a trouser
suit, you see a host of women. And David Cameron in a skirt.”!$ The topics
of their conversations, like those of world leaders, cover, even though there
are only slight references in their changing subjects, issues ranging from the
deterioration of the countryside to ethnic conflicts, to bombings from drones
— all the socio-political reality of our time.
1° Susannah Clapp: Escaped Alone review — small talk and everyday terror from Caryl Churchill,
The Guardian, 31 January 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jan/31/escaped¬
alone-caryl-churchill-review-royal-court (accessed 11 July 2016).
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