old age
Gary Naylor
One wonders what sitcom writers will do when supermarkets finally sweep the last corner shops away with nobody left old enough to buy cigarettes, nobody so offline that they buy newspapers and nobody eating sweets, priced out by sugar taxes. The convenience shop is already acquiring a patina of nostalgia, crowned by a warm glow of happier days. My mother used to send me out aged seven to buy her Embassy Number 1s with me levying a charge of one gobstopper in payment - see, I’m a victim already. Appropriately, that old-school shop is on hand when you want a setting for a gentle, heartwarming, Read more ...
An Actor Convalescing in Devon, Hampstead Theatre review - old school actor tells old school stories
Gary Naylor
One can often be made to feel old in the theatre. A hot take in a snappy 90 minutes (with video!) on the latest Gen Z obsession (is it even Gen Z, or were they last year, Daddio?) can leave one baffled or wondering whose gripe is it anyway. Sometimes the new blood feels like an exotic Type AB negative, when we’re boring old O positive and the transfusion is rejected.But, occasionally, we bus pass holders can be made to feel old in a nice, slippers and no pipe any more (doctor’s orders), way, the subjects familiar, the atmosphere warm, the themes washing over the fourth wall and not fired into Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re in Moscow (we hear that quite a lot) where an ageing woman on a rare trip out of her apartment block catches sight of an advert in a bank’s window. She is soon inside and subjected to a sales pitch by a keen young bank "manager", torn between his understanding of her dementia and the career-boost the loan will bring. Five months later, she’s in her little flat with a debt collector, a man even more ruthless in pursuit of his objectives – and events take an unexpected turn.Theatre503 continues to find highly promising playwrights through its International Playwriting Award scheme, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Like theatre itself, the law finds its voice in stories, performance and spectacle. Any law student will, from that very first induction lecture, become suffused in a culture that is informed by and in turn informs theatre, some classes more like an evening at the Old Vic than an afternoon at the Old Bailey.A Voyage Round My Father mines that lucrative seam of inspiration, John Mortimer (creator of Horace Rumpole, unforgettably given life on screen by Leo McKern) writing a kind of love letter to his blind barrister father. In its latest manifestation, this touring production casts Rupert Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Two elderly men meet in the park while walking their dogs, and become friends. Even when friendship turns to love, the hounds tend to dominate the conversation. It’s hardly the most scintillating set-up for a play.I wanted to like Frank and Percy more. It stars two of our most accomplished and personable actors; it’s quite amusing; and it carries sweet messages about friendship, love and the ability to surprise oneself later in life. And yet, dramatically, writer Ben Wetherill and director Sean Mathias offer little more than a soft-centred character study that doesn’t break free of its Read more ...
David Kettle
Maureen, House of Oz ★★★★Make yourself comfortable – we’ll be here for a while. That’s what our host, 80-something Maureen, advises us several times during the course of her unhurried, hypnotically vivid reminscences of a life lived to the full. The era-defining, population-shifting changes she’s witnessed across her home neighbourhood of King’s Cross, Sydney. The teenage lover who disappeared into the turmoil of World War Two and returned changed forever. The soulmate whose death celebrations she staged with exquisite care. The little black book in which she records the dates of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The family pet dies. It’s a problem many parents face, and when Gracie learns from her evasive father that her dog isn’t just gone, but gone forever, her five-year-old brain cannot process it and so begins a lifelong relationship with deaths, funerals and grief. It’s something we all experience but seldom talk about and, as such, it’s fertile ground for theatre. So Jacob Marx Rice’s new play is a worthy addition to the Finborough Theatre’s fine record of staging interesting work in its intimate space, all the more laudable as, on the face of it, this production is a tough sell in Read more ...
India Lewis
Margaret Atwood has been writing for sixty years now, and, with her latest publication, she has given us a book of short stories in three parts, Old Babes in the Wood. These tales are engaging, but, as is frequently the case with short story collections, they don’t always hang together well.There is a poignantly autobiographical element to many of the stories. The first and third sections centre on the lives of an elderly couple, Nell and Tig, then Nell’s solitary existence after the death of Tig. Atwood lost her own husband – the Canadian author Graeme Gibson – in 2019. Like Tig, Gibson Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What, anyway, is The Makropulos Case all about? Is it simply about the horrors of unnatural longevity; or does it expose the limitations of the rational mind confronted by the irrational; is it about love of a distorted ideal, like some updated Hoffmann tale? Or is it simply a well-made play disrupted by theatre of the absurd and turned for good measure into a tragic music drama?The truth is that it’s all these things and more, a work of stunning complexity both dramatically and, especially, musically. And the best thing I can say about Olivia Fuchs’s new production is that it takes account Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Life, opined Thomas Hobbes, is “nasty, brutish, and short”. In Gaspar Noé’s Vortex it’s not short enough for a dementia-afflicted octogenarian psychiatrist (Françoise Lebrun) and her addled film critic husband (giallo auteur Dario Argento), whose joint decline is a protracted saga of alienation, confusion, and fear.When worrying is your default mode and oblivion your near future, dignity is an out-of-reach luxury and survival a harrowing moment-to-moment ordeal. As blunt as ever about human flaws and vulnerabilities, the Argentina-born French filmmaker Nóe typically offers no bromides or balm Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Like all great art, Samuel Beckett's works find a way to speak to you as an individual, stretching from page to stage and on, on, on into our psyches. This happens not through sentimental manipulation or cheap sensationalism, but through the accrual of impressions, the gathering of memories, the painstaking construction of meaning. Rarely far from view on the London stage, Beckett has two seminal one acts on view briefly in London before touring to Bath. Upon hearing the shoes of May (Charlotte Emmerson) in his 1976 Footfalls pace out the nine steps back and forth as we learn of the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
If it ain’t broke… on tour and in the Glyndebourne summer festival, Mariame Clément's production of Don Pasquale has gratified audiences for a decade now. It surely will again in Paul Higgins's spirited revival. The show returns to the Sussex house at the start of this year’s tour with the leaves about to turn but the gardens still ablaze with late-season colour.If Julia Hansen’s painterly 18th century designs offer an eye-delighting spread of pastoral prettiness, Donizetti’s piece itself ripostes with its tough-minded warning not to take appearances on trust, and to avoid confusions between Read more ...