FringeReview UK 2026

Escaped Alone

Lacasadargilla

Genre: Adaptation, Comedic, Contemporary, Drama, European Theatre, Feminist Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, Multimedia, Political, Short Plays, Theatre, Translation

Venue: The Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

After Rosalinda Conti’s Uccelini last week the Italian company lacasadargilla bring Churchill’s 2016 masterpiece Escaped Alone.  Directed by Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli and Alessandro Ferroni it runs at The Coronet Theatre till May 9.

A project by lacasadargilla who brought Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire in Italian translation here in 2024, it’s the second of two productions they’re bringing to the Coronet this year too. After lacasadargilla the very different and usually silent Teatro dei Gordi who enchanted last year, return with Visite. Performed in the Italian translation of Monica Capuani, the surtitles of Escaped Alone are again exemplary and discreet. But how does it translate?

The Italian cast are notably younger than their English predecessors. Tania Garriba plays Mrs Jarrett (originally taken by Linda Bassett), Caterina Carpio the host Dr Sally (Deborah Findlay’s role),  Arianna Gaudio Vi (originally played by June Watson), Alice Palazzi (Lena, originally Kika Markham).

Escaped Alone marked a shift towards deceptive naturalism. Four women chatting in deckchairs on a succession of summer afternoons in Sally’s garden. Alessandro Ferroni’s soundscapes craft a various mix of apocalypse (often conveyed in a single pulsing word like “Eternity” as much as image, like the sword of Damocles, suspended above). Maddalena Parise crafts a video projection with TV-ad young women perhaps smiling for the developers with varying blue skies, framed by sudden void. Those developers cause at least seven catastrophes during the hour-long work.

Marco Rossi’s and Francesca Sgariboldi’s set is detailed too: it’s strikingly close to Miriam Beuther’s original at the Royal Court, though here somewhat curated. A suburban garden’s cordoned off upstage with hedgerows, here almost a maze (an exquisite Italian sense of a very British obsession). There’s further differences, a relaxing of the original’s stasis. At intervals actors lie on the grass or sprawl or sit bolt upright in deckchairs they seem fated to move around. And indulge in a (very) wacky game of cricket.

That’s another refraction of Englishness Churchill never imagined, and it aestheticises a kind of English accent that isn’t there. Which makes it cuter, less raw, and with a younger cast, less end-of-days. Anna Missaglia’s costumes though give off a colourful frumpiness.

Apocalypse was a theme of Churchill in the 2010s. Here the seven plagues infold the four elements, adding chemical and assorted terminae in punctuated prophesies from Mrs Jarrett  – echoing the Dantean as infernal comedy. Elliptical sentences remain, though characters settle: unnerving layers peel off them in chats of tea and catastrophe.

Garriba’s querulous Mrs Jarrett peeps through a door spying three neighbours, is invited in. Four women over “all at least 70” Churchill stipulates, discuss everything from iPods to quantum: “particles and waves I can take but after that” says Vi (Gaudio, fantastical flyaway ex-hairdresser with stellar curiosity) who once had a kitchen, knife, and husband and lost the lot.

Carpio’s youthfully romancing Sally, a retired doctor, witnessed it all: “I didn’t tell it quite how it was… because.. what he was like… she’s my friend of course” she demurs. Sally in the first monologue reveals a litanic terror of cats slinking into her house to hide (for instance) in matchboxes or suddenly behind her. Carpio’s suite of flinches are both comic and suddenly, not.

Sally also reminds Vi after she deliberately lets cat references out of the bag “how unpleasant you can be”; and lets out her own catty as it were later. Again tensions between dimensioned characters are ground in, recalling earlier Churchill, though it lands more softly here; enacted by gestures of two moving away, leaving one isolated. Sally’s “in love” she’s told and casually spills grandchildren to the others as much as she shuts away her cats. It’s a gradation of loss: Sally’s cats are the least of it.

Lena’s most striking in an outburst: “it’s better to be in an empty room because there’s fewer things to mean nothing… I’d rather hear something bad than something good. I’d rather hear nothing.” It recalls Claxton’s wanting “to hear and say nothing” at the end of Light Shining from Buckinghamshire though this time it’s not a quote. Later Churchill can get close to Beckett. Palazzi underlines Lena’s agoraphobia in a shrinking gesture, the reverse of Garriba’s parallel-universe-stepping Mrs Jarrett.

Though when Lena wistfully desires travel to Japan it’s Sally who ripostes “get to Tesco first” and Vi who reprimands Sally who claims it’s a joke. Shifting loyalties etch these characters deeper than Churchill generally attempts in her telegraphic later style. Gaudio’s robust conclusions as Vi mask deep traumas dealt with pragmatically. Vi confides she can’t enjoy kitchens now.

A decade only freshens this joyful prod at sheer oblivion. A disquisition on birds throws up: “eagles are fascist”/”America has the eagle”/”well” which exploded with terrible laughter in 2016: now there’s a dazed guffaw. In that decade Churchill’s proved more prophet than she wished, rendering off-handers on drones. And G W Bush’s “how many is a Brazilian” was quaint even then.

The play’s solar plexus sneaks between two of Garriba’s set-pieces: the quartet suddenly erupt in a skirling rendition of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, replacing the original ‘Da Do Ron Ron’.

Conversations are punctured the seven times Mrs J steps away from the sun. Despite the screen above, it’s a less technically alien affair than the original where everything fizzed black/red behind her. And I miss it. Here it’s muted. That theatrical coup needs a prosc-arch.

Cassandra now, Garriba prophesies a menu of Armageddons: by earth where executives bury humanity in earth-slides, who scrabble like rats mutating over decades into diverse humanoids; floodwater, originally ‘a campaign to punish the thirsty’; chemical poisoning; famine (80% food diverted to reality TV shows, and wincingly: “the obese sold slices of themselves till hunger drove them to eat their own rashers”). There’s air (“wind.. soon turned heads inside out… Pets rained from the sky. A kitten became famous”); plague “when children drank sugar developed from monkeys”; firestorms started by children and politicians. Garriba is seraphic, suddenly human, twitching at a touch of plague.

Details in their extremity turn comic – that kitten arriving after Sally’s feline phobia. Churchill grills such a gambit through Gaudio’s laconic devastation. For instance a tie-up of six years in Vi’s life with Sally’s vixenish riposte to Vi on Vi’s “knock knock… Dr’: ‘that’s a six-year-old’s joke”. It’s a joke-plotted play.

Garriba’s monologue rounds the drama: just “terrible rage terrible rage” intensifying twenty-five times to a Lear-like apotheosis. Unlike Bassett, who after 40 years’ work with the dramatist does it deadpan, Garriba seeks an emotive musicality, and makes of her keening a broken consort. Mordant Churchill gives place to the production’s musicality. Garriba’s Mrs Jarrett edges the protean Churchill from stepping into the void with tea; into singing in a rapture of distress.

One of Churchill’s most solidly realised plays of recent years – paced by Ferlazzo Natoli and Ferroni with a touch of Dario Fo and commedia dell-arte – it’s time this work travelled out of the anglophone world. Much if it works extremely well. Lacasadargilla this time have absorbed a droll masterpiece and sung it back to us. There are losses beyond the void-stepping original. The “vastation” William James describes as an appalling revelation doesn’t quite land with the younger cast, and it’s challenging to make them out individually. So it mightn’t quite be the droll, dry Churchill we know, but it’s certainly one we should greet. Absorbing; and where else but the Coronet? Without its fearless internationalism, we’d really be parched.

Artistic coordination for the project: Alice Palazzi, Assistant Director: Angelica Azzellini, Translator: Margherita Mauro. Movement dramaturgy  Marta Ciappina, Lighting dramaturgy Luigi Biondi, Research assistance Marco d’Agostin.

Shadow projection in collaboration with: Malombra, Production photographs: Claudia Pajewski.

Production: La Fabbrica dell’Attore / Teatro Vascello.

In co-production with: Romaeuropa Festival, Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa.

In collaboration with: AMAT & City of Pesaro, lacasadargilla, PAV Fabulamundi, Playwriting Europe, RAM – Residenze Artistiche Marchigiane.

With the support of: The Italian Institute of Culture in London, ATCL / Spazio Rossellini, Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and of Idra Teatro / Wonderland Festival.

Published May 7, 2026May 7, 2026 by Simon Jenner