Old Fools - Review

Southwark Playhouse, London

****

Written by Tristan Bernays

Directed by Sharon Burrell

Frances Grey and Mark Arends

Old Fools from Tristan Bernays is a perceptive portrayal of the debilitation that Alzheimer’s disease is wreaking upon an ever growing number of our elderly. A well crafted script that weaves its arc across the decades of Tom and Viv’s marriage, Bernays cleverly plays with time in a way that echoes Alzheimer’s corrosions of the brains synapses and connections.

A two hander that lasts little more than an hour, we meet Tom and Viv in their youth, dancing to the 1930s classic (and subsequently covered by everyone from Sinatra to Bublé) The Way You Look Tonight. A neat twist from Bernays sees the melody, refrained as a motif, poignantly re-appearing as the links between distorted memories and the ever-crumbling present become increasingly pronounced.

Mark Arends and Frances Grey tackle their roles magnificently - both with distinctly different challenges. Arends has to convince us (and he does) that he can morph instantly from carefree young lover, to a decaying geriatric, while Grey, who retains her sanity throughout, plays not only the loving Viv, but also occasionally their daughter Alice too, capturing the child from her infancy through to adulthood.

Bernays is brutal in his dissected devastation of the condition. In their later years, as Viv is providing Tom’s personal care, the pain etched on her face as he confuses her for his mother is tangible. In a flash backed moment we learn too of Tom’s marital infidelity in years long past. While their marriage may have healed the scars remain making the loving support from wife to husband even more heartbreakingly acute. The play is as much a study upon love as it is about dementia. 

Sharon Burrell directs with a profound delicacy – ably assisted by Lucie Pankhurst’s movement and choreography. Played in the round, if there is but one niggle, it is the (rare) moments when the actors’ work can be briefly hard to see. Peter Small’s lighting work is sharply effective too, transporting us through the years in a heartbeat.

Many in the audience will recognise either a nuance or, perhaps, a reality in the world that Bernays and his company create. And for those who to date have been spared the tragedy of Alzheimer’s affecting a loved one, its menace looms large to us all and to our families.

Old Fools is brilliant devastating theatre, marking Bernays out as an outstanding talent amongst his generation. It deserves a life beyond this stunning premiere – until then, it is an unmissable production at the Southwark Playhouse.

Runs until 7th April

Photo credit: Nat James Photography

1984

Almeida Theatre, London

*****

By George Orwell
Adapted and created by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan

Mark Arends, (centre seated) and Company

This adaptation by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan of George Orwell's chillingly prescient classic, respects the story and its 65 year old heritage, yet gives it a disturbing relevance that speaks to our 21st century lives.

One wonders what Orwell would make of today’s multi-lane information superhighway. A world in which millions of digital fingerprints are left every day, creating a priceless seam of data to be mined or exploited by governments, corporations and bandits able to reach beyond the always outmoded and feeble data protection legislation. And that’s just here in the free West. Elsewhere dictatorships and fundamentalists across a spectrum of political and religious extremes tragically perpetuate the evils that Orwell’s oft quoted dystopian hell sought to mimic.

The Almeida’s co-production with Headlong and the Nottingham Playhouse is vivid and perceptive. Chloe Lamford’s set design shows meticulous detail in depicting Winston Smith’s world, details that literally fall away after his arrest, with the stark screened whiteness of Room 101 being so bleak that Smith’s blood, shed during harrowing torture scenes, provides a shocking splash of colour. Ingeniously Lamford deploys large video screens across every scene, graphically promoting the reality that Big Brother is watching everything.

Mark Arends’ Smith embodies the flawed everyman that Orwell intended and his grappling with desire, love and betrayal, against a backdrop of the pernicious Thought Police is as plausible as is his pain during torture that is almost unbearable to witness. Onstage throughout the single act 100 minute play, his performance is a flawless demonstration of his craft. Provoking and breaking Smith, Tim Dutton’s O’Brien is almost a cliché, were it not that the spook he represents is just so believably manipulative. Hara Yannas’ Julia, who loves Smith and yet who betrays him, as he betrays her under duress, gets the balance spot on in her character’s ambiguity.

Deservedly sold out, the play holds a mirror to our fractured world. That our democratic society provides a forum in which theatre such as 1984, together with the political debate it sparks, can thrive, is a liberty that in itself should be cherished. In far too many nations, the worst aspects of Orwell’s grim fantasy remain a terrible reality. 

Runs to 29th March 2014