Escaped Alone

“When the world ended, four women were left alone. It is unclear where they are. It could be purgatory. It could be a theatre. It could be the world left after a catastrophe. A place between life and death. Or perhaps it is not a place we can recognise at all. The answer is not important. What matters is that they are here. They do not know exactly what happened. They do not know whether anything else still exists beyond themselves. They remember their former lives, but it is unclear how much of their memories is real and how much comes from imagination, distorted experience, or an attempt to preserve a world that may no longer exist. Yet they behave as though that world still exists. They talk. Wait. Argue. Remember. Laugh. Make rules. Repeat themselves. Perform various actions. From what remains, they try to create some kind of order. They keep reconstructing the world so they do not have to admit that it is gone. This is not a play about catastrophe. It is a play about people who exist after a catastrophe but still want to live as if it had never happened. A collective anxiety, a sense of society and civilisation falling apart. The play explores not the catastrophe itself, but the human ability to adapt to it. How do we live in a world as though we fail to notice that it is burning? How do we laugh, talk and argue about the small things of everyday life while deep down feeling that the system we live in is so fragile? How does catastrophe become everyday life? And how long can a person live pretending that nothing is happening? The four women keep creating a world anew from what is still left. But it may not be a world we recognise. It may be fragmented, distorted, absurd. Things can become what they never were. The body can become a space. The play becomes a radical act: not a theatre of productivity, but of survival. Not the telling of a story, but people’s effort not to go mad. Not the reconstruction of the world, but an attempt to convince themselves that the world still exists. The four women create their own reality from the remnants of their former lives,” says the director and set designer of the play, Artūras Areima. “Escaped Alone” (2016), by one of the most significant contemporary playwrights, Caryl Churchill (born 1938), is a conversation among four women about the world today and threats that are real—or perhaps imagined. Although written ten years ago, Churchill’s play is particularly relevant today because it delves into themes connected to present-day fears: the climate crisis, social isolation, and political and psychological instability. In this play, the British playwright, known for works exploring the abuse of power and women’s efforts to act within male-dominated systems, turns her attention to human powerlessness. The director chooses to speak about difficulties with humour, inviting audiences to step back and look at themselves from the outside. At this difficult time for Lithuania and the whole world—with wars and a tense geopolitical situation, ecological threats caused by global warming and pollution, as well as dangers posed by the digital world—the play will invite audiences to reflect on what…