Tomorrow

Tramway, Glasgow
Four stars
The lights are down on the entire auditorium from the start  of
Vanishing Point's magical-realist meditation on how age withers us.
With only a triangle of light cast between two grey door-frames, it
could be a wake. The vague figures handing out what at first appears to
be a production line of new-borns suggest something else again culled
from the darkest of science-fiction graphic novels.

When a young man on the way to the hospital where his wife has just
given birth bumps into an old man in the park, a seemingly chance
meeting lurches into a troubling dreamscape that sees the young man
become a mere memory of the elder. As a possible escapee from an old
people's home, he is by turns pettted and patronised by staff too
wrapped up in their own lives to do anything other than care by rote.

Devised by director Matthew Lenton with dramaturg Pamela Carter and a
cast of eight, Tomorrow is as far away from the spate of plays about
ageing that have sprung up over the last few years as you can imagine.
Created in co-production with Brighton Festival, Tramway and 
international partners in Russia and Brazil, the play depicts its
elderly subjects by forcing them into rubber masks that symbolise the
physical and psychological imprisonment of vibrant inner lives
incapable of reaching out anymore beyond an inarticulate return to an
infant state. This is no more clearer than when a gaggle of children
burst across the stage in a beautifully stark and unsentimental
thumbnail abstraction of human behaviour turned inside out that's about
loss of the self as much as those departed.

The Herald, October 6th 2014


ends