What’s the difference between a short play by Caryl Churchill and a full-length one? About five minutes, if her recent Here We Go at the National Theatre and her latest Escaped Alone are anything to go by. On press night the new “full-length” piece lasted, by my watch, 51 minutes. But Churchill has now perfected an elliptical style as individual and as powerful as that of Samuel Beckett. Wallace Shawn was sitting along the row from me, and I thought that this was not unlike a heavily redacted Shawn play: one with only the vowels left, perhaps.

An elderly woman passes the door to a neighbour’s back garden, and goes in. Four of them share a cup of tea and chat about nothing in particular (at one point they simply sing in full The Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron”). Each also has a soliloquy about a matter much closer to the core of the character. The scenes of conversation alternate with the first character, Mrs Jarrett (the only one named onstage although all four have names in the script), alone on a darkened stage, delivering a series of surreal yet chilling monologues about various flavours of regional or global apocalypse: “The chemicals leaked through cracks in the money” is such a Churchillian line.

These passages sound not unlike abbreviated versions of the upheavals narrated by Linda Bassett in Churchill’s Far Away when it premièred upstairs here at the turn of the century; it is no surprise to see Bassett occupying the same role here. She is consummately skilled at giving an unfussy delivery even to the most portentous lines. She takes a back seat in the quartet scenes, in which Deborah Findlay, Kika Markham and June Watson find the rhythms of isolated phrases and, under James Macdonald’s direction, build characters from these fragments. For once, Miriam Buether’s set design commands less attention than the periodically lowering sky, lit by Peter Mumford.

What’s it intended to mean? Blowed if I know. Mrs J’s catalogue of catastrophes might stand for the fears within us all, or for the specific terrors of ageing, when it feels as if the world is ending with us. Perhaps, conversely, it’s that our personal concerns are (rightly or wrongly) no less dear to us than planetary matters. In the end, the medium is the message, and it is created and conveyed with mastery.

Written for the Financial Times.