Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars
When Arthur met Jane, it
was love at first calculatedly clumsy wine spillage. What happens next in
Matthew Seager’s heartfelt two-hander depends on who is doing the remembering.
Or rather, who is capable of remembering, as love’s first excited flush gradually
turns to plague brought on by the onset of Arthur’s all-encroaching Alzheimer’s
disease, which makes the couple’s once blissful domestic life so agonising. The
only thing that can get them through, it seems, is the Frank Sinatra song that
accidentally became the soundtrack of their lives.
With Seager himself
playing Arthur and Angela Hardie as Jane, Paul Brotherston’s production for the
Leeds-based Off the Middle company starts chattily enough, with the pair
draping themselves across fancy chairs like a rat pack amour in waiting. As the
pair flit between past, present and inevitable futures, however, each bar-room
anecdote becomes increasingly less rose-tinted.
There is something oddly
reminiscent of mid-period Pinter here in the play’s depiction of old times. But
when Jane relates with painful matter of factness the grim but simple solution
she considered in dealing with her problems, it is one of many heart-breaking
moments in a show full of snapshots like this.
With an ageing population
having put Alzheimer’s disease squarely on both the civic and the dramatic
agenda some years back, Seager’s take on things is shot through with intimacy
and warmth. These would be enough by themselves to evoke a state of everyday
tragedy we will all have to square up to in some form at some point.
It is an over-riding
playfulness that is laced through the first half of the play’s seventy-five
minutes, however, that lends things as surprising lightness. As Seager and
Hardie capture the full youthful glory of all those golden moments that define
Arthur and Jane, only to have them robbed from under them, their life-long love
affair becomes a still cherished if unreliable memoir.
The Herald, March 7th 2019
ends
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