Escaped Alone ****

Caryl Churchill's play makes you work hard - but in the immensely brilliant way that means you are satisfyingly conscious of your brain clanking and whirring into action, and where the rewards you reap more than fulfil your hopes.

An outsider enters the fenced in garden that houses three other OAP women. Their conversation is wonderfully, recognisably mundane. Their truncated sentences hint at how intuitively they all know what the other thinks, and this mutual understanding hints at the repetitiveness of their lives and conversations. Yet, simmering below the domesticity of their concerns, and explored in monologues that interrupt their dialogue, we learn that their feelings bely the normality they exude. There is this wonderful disjunct between the normality we see and the ridiculous strength of their feelings, and the causes for them, which forcibly prevents us from underestimating them or reducing them to type. One woman feels 'terrible rage', one an irrational and all consuming fear of cats, another the excruciating despondency of depression, the last the regret that a single decision has tainted every subsequent thing, situation and relationship. And then  explorations of the macro are framed against this micro examination of human life. In this microcosm of a back garden, we see the catastrophic bubbling below the surface of every individual's life, held in check by the veneer of civilisation and etiquette. Interspersed with these scenes, and set apart by two fizzing framed wired large squares of red light set against a backdrop of pitch black, macro scenarios are set forth to us by the outsider (who has had to step outside the garden). In these moments, she variously explores abstract, ridiculous, catastrophic consequences that could happen if there was a freakishly unexpected shift in things from the external factors that make our world go round. These external factors span from earth burying the human race, floods, fires, poison spread by money, food shortages and wind. Human activity, both grand and small, affects the series of events that unfold. The visual framing of these episodes means we are constantly trying to work out its connection to the domestic situation. It is the kind of thing that rewards thought and study. This is indicative of how seamlessly James Macdonald's direction, Miriam Buether's set and Peter Mumford's lighting design complement and enhance Churchill's script. The lighting is particularly notable - subtle shifts focusing our attention on a monologuing lady; reflecting the depressive nature of one of the lady's monologues by letting the colour slowly seep out of the garden; and letting the shift to a late afternoon light work as a metaphor for the fact these ladies are all entering their twilight years. The use of a blocking garden fence at the start and end makes it very clear that Linda Bassett is an intruder, something that is supported by the slight disjunct between her contributions to the conversation - she is slightly out of sync. There is a surprising amount of humour to be derived from the piece in this startlingly good production - thanks both to the gentle familiarly of the characters and situations contrasted with the abstract and unexpected, as well as due to an exceptional grasp of comic timing from all the women.