Escaped Alone and What If If Only

An Obie Award-winner several times over, Caryl Churchill (Top Girls) is widely considered one of the world’s greatest living playwrights. In this world-first theatrical experience, Melbourne Theatre Company Artistic Director Anne-Louise Sarks directs two separate Caryl Churchill works: What If If Only, the micro-meditation on grief and possibility starring Alison Bell; and Escaped Alone, a visionary play starring Helen Morse, alongside Deidre Rubenstein and Debra Lawrance, about afternoon tea and the apocalypse.

In Escaped Alone, a woman joins her three neighbours for an afternoon of swapping memories and sharing secrets, in between the telling of catastrophic events, bleak but blackly humorous. In What If If Only, a partner laments their lost love and conjures up countless possible futures, with and without love. In both works, the characters’ hopes, fears and dreams are palpable, visceral and remarkable.