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MARIKO HORI TANAKA point of grotesque absurdity.”” Mrs Jarrett’s monologues refer to catastrophes caused by four elements: water, air, fire and earth, but at the same time every natural disaster in this future world reflects leading-edge technology. The landslide in her first monologue, which was caused by land development carried out by “senior executives,” “buried villages,” where “new communities of survivors underground developed skills of feeding off the dead” and as “time passed,” “various sects developed with tolerance and bitter hatred” among the underground inhabitants till they “went insane.”*° In her second monologue, she says water overflowed in the baths, swimming pools and rivers as well as “the walls of water came from the sea,” and those who survived by running to rooftops were saved by helicopter “when the flood receded,” and the shovels and buckets used to scoop up the muck “were stored in the flood museums.”*" In the third monologue, just like a medieval plague, an epidemic spread from “[t]he chemicals leak[ing] through cracks in the money” and caused “domestic violence,” “school absenteeism,” “miscarriages,” or “birth deformities.”*® “The remaining citizens were evacuated to camps in northern Canada.”*? However, as the fourth monologue reveals, “[t]he hunger began when eighty per cent of food was diverted to tv programmes” so that “the dying could [just] watch cooking” on “iPlayer” or “smartphones.”*4 “The obese sold slices of themselves until hunger drove them to eat their own rashers.”” In the fifth monologue, “[t]he wind developed by property developers” blew so hard that everything — cars, citizens, and pets, as well as “shanty towns” — was blown into the sky and cleared away.°° The sixth monologue focuses again on a plague, which this time “started when children drank sugar developed from monkeys” and so “[g]overnments cleansed infected areas and made deals with allies to bomb each other’s capitals.”*’ The last monologue is about fire spreading from one place to another. But in this case, “[flinally the wind drove the fire to the ocean, where salt water made survivors faint” and “[tlhe blackened area was declared a separate country with zero population, zero growth and zero politics.”** As one can guess from this summary, the dystopia Mrs Jarrett narrates is bizarre. However, we cannot laugh away what she says, because every recent terrible disaster which has caused mass death is implied in her speech, as the following passage from Zizek exemplifies: » « Taylor: Review. 30 Caryl Churchill: Escaped Alone, London, Nick Hern Books, 2016, 8. 31 Ibid., 12. 32 Ibid., 17. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 22. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 28. 37 Ibid., 29. 38 Ibid., 37. + 82 +
