Escaped Alone depicts what appears to be a genteel afternoon chat between four women, all over 70 years old. Weaving through personal fears and global anxieties, Caryl Churchill’s script alternates monologues which develop apocalyptic scenarios and rambling conversations, hinting at mysteries and hidden tensions within this group and beyond their cloistered world. Although these monologues deal in explicit horror (humans buried alive, floods and winds that devastate civilisations), the tone is measured, with director Joanna Bowman avoiding melodrama and sensationalism, allowing words to carry the drama.

This is a play which provokes rather than makes explicit. Friendship between three of the women is occasionally challenged by their past history: one killed their husband while her friend questions whether it was self-defence, and another has a fear of cats which descends into a neurotic reflection on the animal’s capacity to hide itself indoors. Churchill elegantly captures the loops and twists of conversation, often threatening argument but reverting back to a placid chatter. Something sinister is lurking beneath the camaraderie, whether it is merely a sly dig at frailty or a looming catastrophe. But Churchill is happy to leave it undetermined. 

The framing of their interactions by Mrs Jarrett (Blythe Duff), an outsider who joins this trio and sporadically offers blistering monologues of apocalypse, only adds to the mystery: is this her recollection, her attempt to make sense of an apparently innocuous meeting? Frustratingly opaque, the production lurches between two moods, deliberately flattening the contrast through its consistently polite presentation. Escaped Alone may feel passionless at times, but the taut script and four strong performances (every slight gesture evokes some hidden turmoil) offer an intellectually intriguing and dry reflection on how the threat of global disaster refracts into personal anxieties. 

Escaped Alone, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, until Saturday 9 March; Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Wednesday 13–Saturday 16 March.