Dementia at the Fringe
2022; Elsevier BV; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/s1474-4422(22)00439-2
ISSN1474-4465
Autores Tópico(s)Neurology and Historical Studies
ResumoMusic and its absence played a key part in three shows at the 2022 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world's biggest arts festival, as a trio of performers explored the impact of dementia on individuals and their loved ones. Each of the acts approached the task in a different way, with a stand-up comedian and an actor adopting contrasting techniques to tell the stories of their fathers, while a one-act play dealt with the disease from the individual's perspective. Electric Light Orchestra's Mr Blue Sky played at the start of Steve Day's Further Adventures in Dementia, his stand-up show about the loss of his father more than 3 years ago to Alzheimer's disease, as the audience filed into a back room within The City Café in Edinburgh's medieval Old Town, which provided very intimate staging for very intimate material. Day explained he recently had two digital hearing aids fitted, which enhanced his appreciation of music and prompted him to revisit albums from the 1970s, the decade when he felt closest to his father, a world champion bricklayer who went on to become a senior civil servant. National service in the army had taught his dad discipline, which he instilled in the football teams he coached and in his household, but Thursday night marked the only time his kids could talk-back to him, when music programme Top of the Pops was on the television. Day varied the pace of his routine by showing family photographs and playing music. Many of the lyrics hit home hard: “Day after day, I'm more confused”, sang Dobie Gray in the opening line of Drift Away, as Day spoke about his father's decline; “I never thought I'd miss you half as much as I do”, from Madness' It Must Be Love clearly brought a tear to the comedian's eye; and Cat Stevens' Father and Son threw up “I know that I have to go away”. While such sentimentality could have come across as trite in a lesser performer's hands, Day's warmth and honesty made the routine work. “Grief has become for me like the changing of the seasons—it changes, but it never goes away”, Day reflected. Tunes also played a key role in The Great Almighty Gill, a one-man play written and performed by Daniel Hoffmann-Gill, in which he recreated the funeral of his father, the David Gill of the title, who died on Nov 5, 2015. “My eulogy was so good that it deserved a bigger audience than it got at the funeral”, quipped Hoffmann-Gill at the start of his show. While Day's stand-up routine was stripped back, Hoffmann-Gill made full use of his staging, with funeral flowers on stands and a lectern. He gave props to members of the crowd to portray mourners and laid a giant teddy bear on the stage to represent his father in his coffin. The opening half of his show was fairly conventional, with extracts from his eulogy interspersed with asides to the audience and tunes from the funeral, including Elvis Presley's cover of Always on My Mind and Follow the River by Danny and the Champions of the World. While he had mentioned his father's dementia during the eulogy, it wasn't until the second half of the show that the condition cast its shadow over the performance. Hoffman-Gill switched from his own monologue to playing his father, in the style of a stand-up comedian at a 1970s working men's club. He opened the rear of the lectern to reveal a bar full of bottles of Scotch and bourbon, pouring himself a glass and producing an electronic cigarette as he took to the microphone. He told the same stories that featured in the eulogy, but in a much more colourful way. Hoffmann-Gill then showed how dementia took its toll, switching from playing his father as a loud and confident character to a scared man, who became lost and disorientated, unable to button his shirt, which poignantly bore the same pattern as that worn by the giant teddy bear. In contrast, it was the periods of silence that defined Banana Crabtree Simon, a one-man play written by David Hendon and starring CJ de Mooi. While each scene in the one-act play was separated by a burst of jazz, the character Alan's favourite music, it was the pauses in the dialogue that were most striking. De Mooi delivered each scene as a monologue direct to the audience, as if he was sitting in his favourite chair in his living room, conversing with a visitor. The play charted Alan's decline through dementia, from forgetting which light switch controlled the hall and the landing on the stairs, through mixing up the names of his granddaughter, Leah, and his dead sister, Anne, to eventually being huddled on his chair, portraying an adult who thought he was a young child again. There were some very clever touches along the way: Alan's doctor had asked him to pick the names of a fruit, a street, and a person to remember—hence the play's title—and the way they began to fade from his memory between each scene worked well; his shedding of layers of his outfit to mark the passage of time was simple yet effective; and searching for pieces in a jigsaw puzzle while he searched for the right name in the story he was telling was both subtle and bittersweet. Those silences though—delivered deftly by de Mooi, whose intense performance bordered on harrowing at times—getting longer as Alan's decline progressed, were the masterpiece in the work. While they were never seen on stage, the pain felt by Alan's wife, Emily, and his son, Simon, as they tried to cope with his dementia was palpable. While the degree of dramatisation differed from Day's stand-up through Hoffmann-Gill's comedy to de Mooi's play, all three performances were intense, with each act capturing the anguish felt by people with a loved one living with dementia. From the upbeat notes of Further Adventures in Dementia and The Great Almighty Gill to the more painful side of Banana Crabtree Simon, the trio made for a fascinating exploration of the impact of the disease. Further Adventures in Dementia Edinburgh Festival Fringe Edinburgh, UK Aug 5–28 https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/further-adventures-in-dementiaThe Great Almighty Gill Edinburgh Festival Fringe Edinburgh, UK Aug 5–14, 16–21, 23–29 https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/great-almighty-gill Further Adventures in Dementia Edinburgh Festival Fringe Edinburgh, UK Aug 5–28 https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/further-adventures-in-dementia The Great Almighty Gill Edinburgh Festival Fringe Edinburgh, UK Aug 5–14, 16–21, 23–29 https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/great-almighty-gill
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