‘Out of Time: Ageing Women and the Contemporary in Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone’

The contemporary as category or concept is frequently discussed in metaphorical terms that align it with early phases of the life course. Scholarship on contemporary theatre often emphasises how contemporary work is finding new ways of expressing (new) things, this newness inflected with a set of associations more often aligned with youthfulness than old age. To be contemporary – as a text or as a subject – is somehow to mediate the ways in which our current moment is urging us into new futures. This conception of the contemporary has something in common with the mobile, self-scripting, and future-oriented neoliberal subject, a classed and gendered construction that is also framed in ageist terms.

Caryl Churchill’s play Escaped Alone, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in early 2016, features a character list of four women, who, the stage directions state, are ‘all at least seventy’. These women are in some ways the familiar untimely figures of old age. They are the (anachronistic) background, who (fittingly) sit in ‘Sally’s backyard’. In part, they serve as framing for the proper subject of the play: the absurd catastrophe of the contemporary geopolitical moment represented in strikingly, formally-experimental dramaturgical terms. Yet, these older women simultaneously press at the edges of their inscription as background in a number of ways. This paper focused specifically on how the figure of the untimely ageing woman – often invisible, occluded or normatively reproduced in ageist ways – is reframed in Escaped Alone to disrupt normative notions of older age, ageing women, and concepts of the contemporary.

Siân Adiseshiah is Reader in English and Drama at the University of Lincoln. Her research interests are in contemporary theatre, utopianism, class studies, women’s writing and age studies. She is author of Churchill’s Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill (CSP, 2009), co-editor (with Louise LePage) of Twenty-First Century Drama: What Happens Now (Palgrave, 2016) and co-editor (with Rupert Hildyard) of Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now (Palgrave 2013). She is currently writing a monograph with the title Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre (Methuen Bloomsbury, 2019) and co-editing (with Jacqueline Bolton) debbie tucker green: Critical Perspectives (Palgrave, 2019). She is founder and coordinator of Lincoln’s 21^st Century Research Group and an Executive Committee member of BACLS.

Dr Siân Adiseshiah