Really Old, Like Forty Five
National Theatre, London
One of the most pressing social issues of our time is the care of the elderly, so Tamsin Oglesby’s new play, Really Old, Like Forty Five, seems at first to be a timely intervention in the debate. But only at first. We start with a family which, in its complexity and chaos, mirrors contemporary life. When Lyn begins to lose her memory and then acts erratically, her brother Robbie and her daughter Cathy decide to put her into a care home, the Ark. Add Lyn’s sister Alice, plus her grandson Dylan, plus Millie, a 16-year-old adopted daughter, and you can appreciate that it takes Oglesby a while to introduce her characters.
Then things get really complicated. Lyn’s care home turns out to be a hospital, where Alice also ends up after a fall, and Millie suddenly announces that she is pregnant. Then, equally suddenly, Oglesby’s play morphs from a family drama into a science fiction dystopia. The Ark is an Orwellian institution where research scientists, led by the sinister Monroe, are experimenting on how to cope with the elderly by using a variety of medicines, most of which have disturbing side effects. Like death.
In this grim hospital, each patient is assigned a robot nurse. Lyn gets Mimi, a cheerful but utterly vacant mannequin who responds only to outside stimuli and whose mechanical gestures are a parody of human movement. Like a glorified cat, Mimi is at her best when she is stroked or petted. Sudden noise or anger only repels her.
Caring for the aged and the horrors of Alzheimer’s are both hot subjects, but the problems of old age seem to carry the whiff of depression, so how does Oglesby make her story entertaining? At first, she mixes acute one-liners with a playful attitude to a serious subject, and this beguiling combination promises to be both informative and amusing. The adsurdism of the sci-fi strand, exemplified by Paul Ritter’s rasping performance as the monomaniacal Monroe, contrasts well with the aching pain of the family story.
Likewise, the scenes in which the hospitalised Lyn talks to the robotic Mimi deliver a good comparison between the real distress of the human and the programmed, fake empathy of the machine. But even Anna Mackmin’s spirited direction, on designer Lez Brotherston’s split-level set, can’t make perfect sense of the accumulating ideas that Oglesby throws at the audience. As well as Alzheimer’s and care for the elderly, the play examines issues such as euthanasia, motherhood, family and identity.
Despite some diverting video projections, designed by Mark Grimmer and Lysander Ashton, and some solid performances from Judy Parfitt as Lyn, Marcia Warren as Alice, Gawn Grainger as Robbie and Amelia Bullmore as Cathy, the mounting toll of loose ends and odd switches in tone become increasingly perplexing.
What you remember is a superb performance by Michela Meazza as Mimi, all buzzing robotic gestures, jerky movements and insinuating smiles. Somehow the strength of this acting suggests that, in a play crammed so full of issues, there’s a certain soullessness at the heart of the story. When a play’s best moments involve a megalomaniac and a robot, you just know that something is, like, very wrong.
Aleks Sierz
