This is a brave, quiet, contemplative piece with the odd emotional gut punch. Based on autobiographical experiences of the performers and director – the actors use their own names – it recalls the loss of a loved one to Alzheimers while reaffirming the importance of stories.
Lightbulbs blink on and off, searching and illuminating the corners of memory. A voiceover reads diary excerpts of a young woman determined to learn how to dance. World War Two newsreel footage projects onto a 1930s-style suitcase. The multimedia enhances the sense of fracturing, presenting different voices and content that together try to make sense of who the loved one was – recognising that it’s probably impossible.
Later diary entries expound the profound loneliness of a cancer diagnosis, first faced by Sarah’s mother as a young parent and again 24 years later as an older woman, who concludes a second time that she wants to continue to live.
Sarah and Hettie go about bagging and boxing, sorting into ‘keep’ or ‘don’t keep’, with an unsympathetic Housing Association looming over the sad process of packing up a life – a process that we must all face in the natural order of things.
While the two friends work, a projected photograph of a smiling young woman in wartime appears to ask: Who are we? When are we most ourselves?
The play feels like a plea to remember that those who now need our care were once articulate and eloquent; creating, thinking, making, caring, brave.
There’s something too about unshared stories. Sarah appears profoundly moved by her mother’s diary entries – they clearly weren’t shared outside of the diary. She herself fears that she has no-one to pass her mother’s stories onto.
‘I’ll listen’, says Hettie.
This is a moving and vulnerable piece of work that might prompt a few tears of human connection.
Claire Gulliver
Fringe TheatreFest views 