Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Five stars
A haunting beauty pervades throughout Ramesh Meyyappan’s slow burning meditation on life, love and loss for this collaboration between the Vanishing Point and Raw Material companies in association with Aberdeen Performing Arts. The loss comes both physically and mentally for Harry, the old man at the heart of the piece. Harry has just taken up residence in a care home, with only his tireless carer May for company.
Harry can only communicate through sign language, which May can only half work out. As even that source of understanding starts to fade, Harry retreats into a world where past and present merge in an elegiac dreamscape shared with his true love, Elise.
Meyyappan’s starting point may be the debilitating effects of dementia, but in partnership with director Matthew Lenton he has created an emotionally driven tone poem full of light and shade. Much of the mood of the piece comes from Becky Minto’s set, which features a remarkable use of moving mirrors that become integral to the action. Fused with Simon Wilkinson’s painterly lighting and a haunting piano led score by David Paul Jones, this provides the perfect backdrop to Harry’s attempts to hold on to his sense of self.
As Elicia Daly’s dryly stoic May tends to Harry, what follows is almost too painful to bear as an anguished Harry explodes with rage, unable to cling on to the ghost of his younger self, played by Rinkoo Barpaga, and the spectral presence of Amy Kennedy’s Elise. The older Harry is played by Meyyappan himself with a pathos that skirts easy sentiment for something deeper in a stunning and all engulfing creation possessed by a deep-set humanity at its heart.
The Herald, October 7th 2024
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