King’s
Theatre, Edinburgh
Three
stars
It’s
the clutter you notice first in David Grindley’s staging of Christine Mary
Dunford’s play, adapted from Lisa Genova’s novel about a woman whose life is
ripped apart by young-onset dementia aged just fifty. The furniture in the open-plan
living room and kitchen arrangement of Jonathan Fensom’s set seems to spill
into each other, the physical manifestation of a busy and over-loaded mind that
will gradually be stripped bare until there’s nothing to hold onto anymore.
This
is what happens to Alice, the driven Harvard linguistics professor who finds
herself slowly losing her faculties. Like her would-be actress daughter Lydia,
Alice suddenly has to improvise her way through life, aided here by her inner
self brought to life by Eva Pope, who gives voice to Alice’s internal workings.
Where Alice and her husband John were once academic equals, by the end she
can’t recognise him or her children, but remains dependent on the kindness of
the people closest to her who are now strangers.
Making
its UK premiere in this tour of Leeds Playhouse production from earlier this
year, Dunford’s play pre-dates the 2015 Oscar-winning film by a couple of
years, but over its 90-minute duration packs a similar emotional punch. Despite
the elegiac score sign-posting the way, much of the production’s power comes
from Sharon Small’s performance as Alice. It’s an increasingly moving and
remarkably nuanced turn, which, along with Pope’s presence, forms the heart and
soul of an occasionally uneven piece of work.
This
is despite the efforts of Martin Marquez as John, Ruth Ollman as Lydia and Mark
Armstrong as Alice and John’s high-flying son Thomas. In the end, though, as
Alice’s half-life goes on, it is Small that leaves her mark in a heart-rending
portrayal of a woman who loses herself, with only the love of others to keep
her going.
The Herald, September 27th 2018
ends
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