{"id":1112,"date":"2015-05-22T23:06:11","date_gmt":"2015-05-22T22:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1112"},"modified":"2015-05-22T23:06:11","modified_gmt":"2015-05-22T22:06:11","slug":"the-old-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2015\/05\/the-old-story.html","title":{"rendered":"The old story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"old<\/a><\/p>\n

The death of a child \u2013 in theatre \u2013 is tragedy. The decline of a parent, perplexity. Most western theatregoers don\u2019t live in melodrama, but in the mess of every day, inching forward in anxiety. Theatre can offer the consolation of an underexplored situation being known: it\u2019s something to be seen. Three times recently I\u2019ve wandered out of the theatre almost in a daze, hollowed out by productions that staged the slope of ageing, and of caring. All three quietly excavate new theatrical territory, finding tender ways of playing, innovative ways of staging, this subject matter.<\/p>\n

What is striking is that it is younger theatre makers who are exploring old age. Stoppard, Churchill and Frayn haven\u2019t ventured there. Yet Florian Zeller was only 33 when The Father<\/em> <\/a>premiered in France in 2012. Barney Norris wrote Visitors<\/em><\/a> for Up In Arms at 27; Selma Dimitrijevic, 40, writes and directs Gods Are Fallen and All Safety Gone<\/em> for Greyscale<\/a>. Old age, and what it means for families, for social and healthcare networks and of course for elderly individuals themselves, will demand attention as we live with an ageing population. These productions don\u2019t present the bigger picture: all three twist around the vexed, intimate bond between parent and adult child. A relationship frayed by illness, tightened by concern, tripwired by obligation, love and grief.<\/p>\n

\"Linda<\/a>

Linda Bassett rehearsing Visitors. Photo: Up in Arms<\/p><\/div>\n

Slow decline, an almost imperceptible shift into a new reality, could resist reflection in time-bounded performance. Visitors<\/em> was the most familiar in form \u2013 inviting us into a home, its furniture worn by familiarity, eavesdropping on scenes set over several weeks as Edie, an elderly farmer\u2019s wife, slowly declined. Norris\u2019 generous naturalism absorbed us into the household dynamic, rippled by a young carer and maladroit son. I\u2019ve always found it difficult to describe how Linda Bassett<\/a>, an unsung marvel of British theatre, works. You can\u2019t pinpoint physical or vocal tricks, displays of charisma or transformation. I only know that through barely apparent means she shows us into her characters\u2019 souls. When those characters offer grey-toned states like apprehension, suspicion, care, she\u2019s peerless. Here, in Alice Hamilton\u2019s production, she let us sit alongside Edie\u2019s warmth and confusion, with a poignancy that grasped your heart.<\/p>\n

Kenneth Cranham<\/a>\u2019s performance in The Father<\/em> is more obviously barnstorming, as befits Andr\u00e9, an overbearing patriarch in denial of his illness. Zeller \u2013 in Christopher Hampson\u2019s lucid version \u2013 gives us a sense of Andr\u00e9\u2019s reality through a painfully spry theatricality. Andr\u00e9 is beset by dementia, and it looks like theatre. Furniture vanishes between scenes from Miriam Buether\u2019s scrupulous white box set. Andr\u00e9 doesn\u2019t always recognise the person playing his daughter \u2013 and neither do we. He has no idea if a menacing, jocular man is really his daughter\u2019s ex husband. Us either.<\/p>\n

From the inside<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the mysteries of dementia is what it must feel like from the inside. Scrabbling for a memory that doesn\u2019t come. Unaware that memories have been lost, as if pages fall from the atlas. I try, but I can\u2019t truly feel it. So Zeller\u2019s act of theatrical imagining is immense, and in James Macdonald\u2019s production, Cranham anchors it in intensely-realised distress. A favourite actor of Pinter, he has a bullish, gravelly authority, a squeezebox set of lungs, so his sense of powerlessness is destabilising. He\u2019s beautifully counterposed by Claire Skinner \u2013 blanched, twisting thin-twig fingers, nerves down to the wire \u2013 playing his daughter (most of the time). Her reality is the burden of care, and you can almost hear her temples throbbing from the back of the stalls. The final image is Cranham\u2019s great red face, tucked between white sheets and pillows, his glassy blue eyes blinking in distress, all consolation and security dropped away. It\u2019s awful even typing the image back\u00a0into my mind.<\/p>\n

In Gods Are Fallen and All Safety Gone<\/em> (a quote from Steinbeck\u2019s East of Eden<\/em>), Dimitrijevic shapes the awful sorrow of parental illness with quiet rigour. The stage is all but bare, with a small table at the side where two people attempt a jigsaw puzzle. On stage, two gentle blokes: one tall and silvered, the other shorter, hairier. One man playing the ma, the other her daughter.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no furniture, but the relationship is as deeply grooved as the dint in the carpet beneath the family sofa. Four conversations are separated by extended silence. The first three each tread a similar path, though with factual variations (how is Auntie Marie? Is the daughter still with her boyfriend? Did she piss in the shower?). Meanwhile, the actors shuttle around each other on the small stage, swerving and looping and juddering to a halt as the relationship follows its timeworn grooves. Only in the third, when the daughter becomes confrontational, do we worry whether the mother is being everyday exasperating, or something more concerning. The fourth scene, seated, allows a belated sharing of truths.<\/p>\n

\"Sean<\/a>

Sean Campion and Scott Turnbull. Photo: Greyscale<\/p><\/div>\n

Visitors<\/em> and The Father<\/em> must be exposing for their central performers, enacting a situation which may one day be their own. Greyscale\u2019s Sean Campion and Scott Turnbull stand at one remove from their material but are beautifully tender with ti and each other: they sometimes hug a pause too long, as if leaving space for each character to puzzle out the other. Campion\u2019s mother, baffled within her own patterns of behaviour. Turnbull\u2019s daughter, smiling with frustration and affection.<\/p>\n

The jigsaw puzzlers are a real mother and daughter \u2013 a different pair every night, their presence keeping the men on the right side of travesty. When I saw the show, the women kept their eyes down on the fiddly game, but the mother couldn\u2019t help looking up, and soon both were fully absorbed by the play. Smiling with recognition, frowning in concentration. Noise from the street outside the Camden People\u2019s Theatre continually intrudes, but inside is all silent attention.<\/p>\n

Lessons in feeling<\/strong><\/p>\n

The playwright David Eldridge<\/a> recent cited John Osborne’s notion that he wanted to give an audience \u2018lessons in feeling.\u2019 It isn\u2019t necessarily a current notion, but its pertinent here \u2013 these three plays make you feel, for yourself, for others. It also says something about our unstable times, where austerity stretches out to the crack of doom, that younger artists are thinking about old age with such quiet dread. They should be writing fizzpop plays that thrust into a world they\u2019re ready to inherit. Instead, they contemplate both their own ageing and, more pressingly, the likelihood of their own transformation into helicopter children, hovering anxiously over their parents while feeling unfit for the task. The gods are fallen, but we\u2019re not ready to be gods in turn. Not yet. Not ever.<\/p>\n

Photo (top): Kenneth Cranham in The Father. Photo: Simon Annand<\/em><\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The death of a child \u2013 in theatre \u2013 is tragedy. The decline of a parent, perplexity. Most western theatregoers don\u2019t live in melodrama, but in the mess of every day, inching forward in anxiety. Theatre can offer the consolation of an underexplored situation being known: it\u2019s something to be seen. Three times recently I\u2019ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1114,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[47,34],"class_list":{"0":"post-1112","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-memory","9":"tag-theatre","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1112"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1116,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112\/revisions\/1116"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}