Well, that's easy to check out as long as you have a printer connected. It's going to depend on the printer. Doesn't work on my Brother laser printer on Linux, even if I send some valid Postscript to /dev/usb/lp0 . Piping it to lpr works of course, as long as you have a default printer selected.
Once you've established that you can print basic text, you can expect that the printer's escape codes will work.
Thanks. Adding a formfeed resulted in an empty page, so there are clearly possibilities but since I can't find a quick PCL example[0] and lpr suits me fine I'm not going to investigate further.
[0] I'm assuming PCL is most likely supported, and I remember having worked with an EPSON dot-matrix printer (i.e. probably using ESC/P) in 8-bit days and that it didn't require special commands to print basic text.
Once you've established that you can print basic text, you can expect that the printer's escape codes will work.