A dementia ward confines elderly residents who appear socially invisible and endure acute loneliness. Joan believes her stay is temporary and shows disorientation when her daughter Lynn visits. Lynn’s emotions remain difficult to read while Joan’s sons express intense grief and anger. Other residents speak in fragmented memories or fall into silence, including Agnes with recollections of her husband and an otter colony and Paula, a former midwife, who is curmudgeonly. Conversations cross and tangle, creating moments of accidental humor that risk turning into laughter at the characters. When residents die, they join the audience, intensifying the emotional impact. Performances portray aging with intensity and truth while indicting institutional neglect.
"Set in what seems like a locked dementia ward, this play is both an unwavering portrait of what it means to be old, and an indictment of a system that leads to such acute loneliness in this last leg of life."
"Zeldin explores this from the point of view of Joan (Linda Bassett, moving beyond measure), who thinks she has been admitted on a temporary basis. The opening scene shows her disorientation before her put-upon daughter Lynn (Rosie Cavaliero) comes to visit."
"Beyond this family are the other residents, by turns silent or bearing jumbled up memories of the past, from Agnes (Ann Mitchell) who speaks of her husband and her beloved otter colony, to curmudgeon Paula (Diana Payan), who was once a midwife. Some merely shuffle on and off again."
"When they die, they join the audience. It is gruelling, intense and true, with darkly sublime performances from actors playing the residents. Initially, there is an edge of accidental humour as characters have confused, crisscrossing conversations, more with themselves than each other."
Read at www.theguardian.com
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