Escaped Alone - Digital Programme

LACASADARGILLA & PICCOLO TEATRO

The Coronet Theatre is a reimagined architectural and design jewel, originally built as a grand Victorian Playhouse, now a pioneering home for international, cross-disciplinary arts. Curated by Artistic Director Anda Winters, over the past decade it has become a significant cultural landmark.

Known for world and UK premieres, its mission is to bring artists and art forms from around the world, championing work that would not otherwise be seen. The programme enables access for diverse audiences to world-class theatre, dance, music, film and visual arts through co-productions, commissions, and invited works.

Centrally situated in London’s Notting Hill, The Coronet has two main spaces: The Auditorium and The Print Room Studio. With the additional performances and exhibitions in the bar, the atmospheric upper rooms, and basements, the whole building is a living global showcase.

CARYL CHURCHILL: ESCAPED ALONE

LACASADARGILLA & PICCOLO TEATRO

In a quiet suburban garden, three vivacious old friends sit together, talking of neighbours, cats, and small regrets. A neighbour is invited in and darker secrets emerge, punctured by unseen horrors beyond the fence. A singular account of the deep unease that our world produces at every moment of our lives.

Balancing on the edge between the familiar and the catastrophic, its fractured conversations reveal both the absurdity and fragility of modern life.

In this new production Churchill’s vision and razor-sharp text is reimagined through a distinctly Italian lens – one that blends theatre, video, and soundscape to create an experience that feels both domestic and otherworldly. At once poetic and political, this contemporary classic remains one of Churchill’s most daringly

CAST & CREATIVE TEAM

Written by

Translation

A project by

Directed by Cast

Dramaturg:

Soundscapes and scenic concept

Movement dramaturgy

Set design

Visual environment / image dramaturgy

Lighting dramaturgy

Monica Capuani

Caryl Churchill lacasadargilla

Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli and Alessandro Ferroni

Caterina Carpio, Tania Garribba, Arianna Gaudio, Alice Palazzi

Margherita Mauro

Alessandro Ferroni

Marta Ciappina

Marco Rossi and Francesca Sgariboldi

Maddalena Parise

Luigi Biondi

Costumes Anna Missaglia

Research assistance

Marco d’Agostin

Assistant Director Angelica Azzellini

Production

With the support of

Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa, Teatro di Roma – Teatro Nazionale

The Italian Institute of Culture in London, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and of Idra Teatro / Wonderland Festival

LACASADARGILLA:

FREE ARTIST TALK

Fri 08 May; 3pm

Join us for a special free artist talk with lacasadargilla – the company behind Uccellini (Little Birds) and Escaped Alone.

In this lecture, lacasadargilla founders – Alessandro Ferroni, Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, Alice Palazzi, and Maddalena Parise – will share insights into their artistic identity, their process, and their distinctive approach to staging theatre.

Working with a wide range of texts – whether adapted, contemporary, or situated firmly within the canon – lacasadargilla take what they call an ‘architectural’ approach to theatre making, building projects through a focus on cinematic devices and physical precision.Through this, they are able to create layered work that builds on concepts of time and mythographies, and on the linguistic, psychic and personal legacies that bind us to our past, and to our future.

Widely recognised in Italy, the company will reflect on the artistic space they occupy in contemporary italian theatremaking.

POST-SHOW DISCUSSION

We will be hosting a post-show discussion with professor Paola Bono, Italy’s leading expert curator of the works of Caryl Churchill, after the performance on Friday 08 May. Free for ticket holders.

CARYL CHURCHILL

Caryl Churchill has won four OBIEs, for Cloud Nine in 1981, Top Girls in 1982, Serious Money in 1987 as well as being awarded the Sustained Achievement Award in theatre in 2001. She has also won the Hollywood Dramalogue Critics Award for Cloud Nine and the Susan Smith Blackburn Award for FEN in 1984 and for Serious Money in 1987. Serious Money won the Olivier Award for Best Play of 1987, the Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy and the Plays and Players Award and Susan Smith Blackburn Award in 1987. In 2010, Caryl was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame and in 2018 she received the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s Outstanding Contribution to Writing Award.

LACASADARGILLA

For over fifteen years, lacasadargilla – founded by Alessandro Ferroni, Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, Alice Palazzi, and Maddalena Parise –has been exploring the human condition through avant-garde theatre, merging psychoanalysis, philosophy, and science.

lacasadargilla is well known in Italy for its productions of original texts, literary adaptations and contemporary plays.The ensemble builds its projects on the concepts of time and mythographies, as well as on the linguistic, psychic and personal legacies that bind us to our past and to our future. All performances have an architectural approach, with a focus on linguistic and cinematic devices as well as on physical precision.

PICCOLO

TEATRO DI MILANO

Founded in 1947 by Giorgio Strehler, Paolo Grassi, and Nina Vinchi, the Piccolo Teatro di Milano was Italy’s first public repertory theatre and remains a leading cultural institution. Recognised as a Theatre of Europe since 1991, it presents world-class productions across three venues and runs a renowned School of Theatre. Under Claudio Longhi’s direction, the Piccolo continues to promote new writing, international collaboration, and innovation in contemporary performance.

DIRECTORS’ NOTE

Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, Alessandro Ferroni

In less than an hour, Escaped Alone tells a nimble and acute image of an all-human apocalypse seen through the eyes of four women at the turn of their lives. Sally, Vi, Lena longtime friends and Mrs. Jarrett the newcomer understand each other instantly without needing to finish a conversation; they interrupt and correct each other, or let a embryonic thought float until someone else chimes in with their own thoughts, while between their elliptical half-sentences the multiplicity of the world blossoms, and each woman fills in the gaps on her own.

In the apparent chatter of the four ladies, in their irresistible verbal incontinence, Mrs. Jarrett's soliloquies direct appeals to the audience, halfway between omen and anathema are the formidable dramatic device with which Escaped Alone stirs the languor of their and our lives, disrupting languages and preconceptions, small daily follies and habits of the theater, and of the audience itself anchoring every detail of the protagonists' existence to a menacing and vivid fresco of our present. And so, as the afternoon draws to a close and the four friends contemplate the decline of their lives while sipping tea, a dark refrain also announces the possible demise of our humanity.

But then, if we think about it, just long enough to be afraid, isn't this what happens to us every day? Only we look away, convincing ourselves that our afternoon teas are worth what they are: a chirping, reassuring chatter that will keep at bay, for some unknown reason, what we glimpse behind the garden fence, along with the persistent, nagging impression that something is already falling apart before our eyes.

And it is to four elderly ladies with the irreducible souls of girls and a distinct talent for folk songs that Churchill entrusts the task of recounting all this on stage. Churchill chooses the joyful scandal of female old age in a world of perpetual youth. Female, of course.

In Escaped Alone, all the layers of language, figures, stories, and symbols ultimately serve to gently lead us to a single question: what is really happening to our world?

This text still resonates today with an incredible, moving faith in that residual place of collective consciousness we call theater, which Caryl Churchill's dramaturgy continually challenges. Indomitable like the four ladies, full of grace in leading us toward an abyss. Escaped Alone achieves this feat thanks to a writing that is ironclad, as mobile as a musical score and psychologically layered, made up of sudden ellipses, diversions, shifts and mysteries, ambiguous half-sentences, interrupted speeches and allusions. A writing that knows how to play with all the unsaid elements of life and theatre

1.THE PLAY

2.CARYL

CHURCHILL

Caryl Churchill was born in London in 1938. After graduating in English literature from Oxford, she began working as a radio and television writer for the BBC.

She had her first theatrical successes at the end of the 1950s, and in 1972 made her stage debut in 1972 at the Royal Court Theatre, an institution that she would remain tied to for the rest of her artistic career.

In her more than forty works, Churchill takes on a wide range of mainly political and social themes: the pitfalls of the family, the deepening of inequalities, the evermore pressing question of immigration and the inevitable conflicts that it leads to, and a growing worry over the plundering of the Earth’s resources and for the effects of climate change.

3.THE TITLE

The title of the work and of the play is a quotation from the bible, Job 1:15, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee”.The same phrase is also present in the epilogue to Moby Dick by Hermann Melville, when Ishmael, the narrator of the entire story of the battle between Captain Ahab and the white whale, tells how he was miraculously saved following the sinking of the Pequod and lived to tell the tale.

4.LACASADARGILLA

The themes and the language adopted by contemporary English playwriting are in particular harmony with the sensibilities of lacasadargilla ensemble, which has, over the years, staged – among others – Lear by Edward Bond, the award-winning When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell, and L’amore del cuore (Heart’s Desire), again by Caryl Churchill.

A collective of artists and associate of the Piccolo, in 2023 lacasadargilla staged Anatomia di un suicidio by Alice Birch, produced by the Milanese theatre, with which it won five Ubu awards and filled the Teatro Grassi for two consecutive seasons.

13 – 16 May

‘‘A prodigiously daring & imaginative artistic collective.” Lost in Theatreland

LEADING POETS, INTIMATE READINGS

THE CORONET THEATRE TEAM

Artistic Director & CEO

Anda Winters

Audience Experience Manager

Giudi Di Gesaro

Company & Production Coordinator

Emma Smith

Consultant Producer

Hetty Shand

Finance Manager

Andrew Michel

General Manager

Andy McDonald

Lead Technician

Louis Williams

Marketing Manager (Freelance)

Elliot Hall

Poetry Coordinator

Marion Manning

PR Consultant

Sharon Kean

Producer

Daphne Seale

Producing & Marketing Assistant

Esme Bishop

Theatre Administrator / PA to the

Artistic Director

Vihaan Chandy

Box Office Assistant

Ivana Dieli

Duty Managers

Francesca Battinieri, Annabelle Gardner, Joanna Papanastassiou, Aylin Rodoplu, Hazel Townsend

Front of House Staff

Matilda Badziak, Eugénie Bakker, Samya Bose-Rosling, Theo Chen, Stephanie Christodoulidou, Marcello Crisci, Merilee Ettia-Russell, Cheryl Fairon, Katrina Foster, Trey Francis, Thea Gavanski, Alessandra Gonnella, Hugo Gregg, Li Ikoku-Smith, Dane Kostic, Emma Laird-Craig, Maria Lisberg-Jonasson, Aija Miranda, Hamza Mullick, Andreane Rellou, Robert Veng, Kajsa Wiberg-Norquist

Trustees

Linda Bernhardt, Mike Fisher, Mimi Gilligan, Jane Quinn, Anda Winters, Bill Winters (Chair)

Thank you to our patrons for their generous support:

Honorary Trustee

Mimi Gilligan

Cupola

Mike Fisher and T. S. Eliot

Foundation

Club Room

Tom and Maarit Glocer, Julia and Scott Rochester, and Jane Quinn