Many playwrights need a couple of hours to effectively tell their story and capture the audience’s imagination. Not Caryl Churchill.

In half that time (plus interval), Melbourne Theatre Company delivers two of the British playwright’s short works, including her latest, which is a mere 20 minutes long. What If If Only, a gem about grief and possibility, is preceded by 2016’s Escaped Alone. For just under an hour, it splices a friendly conversation with dispatches from the apocalypse.

They stand alone, but together these plays offer intriguing thematic links about human connection and disconnection, and potential realities very different to the well-worn grooves of the characters’ lives (and, by extension, our own).

Escaped Alone, Melbourne Theatre Company. Photo © Pia Johnson

Directed by MTC’s Artistic Director, Anne-Louise Sarks, this double bill is a welcome opportunity to savour the precise, inventive and sometimes weirdly funny writing of Churchill, who is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest living playwrights.

Handsomely lit by Paul Jackson, Marg Horwell’s simple but attractive set for Escaped Alone comprises garden chairs almost hidden among tall, blooming grasses. Mrs Jarrett joins three other women chatting in this wild, sunny...