I’m the Only One Who Escaped

“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 what matters. What matters is that they are here. They do not know exactly what happened. They do not know whether anything else exists beyond themselves. They remember their previous 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 if that world still existed. They talk. They wait. They argue. They remember. They laugh. They make rules. They repeat themselves. They perform various actions. From what remains, they try to create some kind of order. Again and again, they reconstruct the world so they do not have to acknowledge that it is gone. This is not a performance about a catastrophe. It is a performance 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 performance explores not the catastrophe itself, but people’s ability to adapt to it. How do we live in a world as if we do not notice that it is burning? How do we laugh, talk and argue over the small things of everyday life when, deep down, we feel how fragile the system we live in is? 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 remains. But it is not necessarily a world we recognise. It may be fragmented, distorted, absurd. Things may become what they have never been. The body may become a space. The performance becomes a radical act: a theatre not of productivity, but of survival. Not the telling of a story, but people’s efforts not to go mad. Not the restoration of the world, but an attempt to convince themselves that the world still exists. The four women create their reality from the remnants of their former lives,” says director and set designer Artūras Areima. The play *Escaped Alone* (2016) by Caryl Churchill (born 1938), one of the most significant contemporary playwrights, is a conversation between four women about the world today and threats that may be real—or imagined. Although written ten years ago, Churchill’s play is particularly relevant today because it delves into themes connected with present-day fears: the climate crisis, social isolation, and political and psychological instability. The British playwright, known for plays examining the abuse of power and women’s efforts to act within male-dominated systems, turns in this play to human helplessness. The director chooses to talk about hardship with humour, inviting audiences to step back and look at themselves from the outside. At this difficult time for Lithuania and the whole world—amid wars and a tense geopolitical situation, ecological threats caused by global warming and pollution, as well as dangers posed by the digital world—the performance will invite audiences to reflect on…