Writer and Director: Sara Espocito
It’s Beckett on a pub theatre budget. Absurd, bold and brave, Ad A.’s script explodes from a kernel of poetry, redefining in-yer-face theatre and showing a work that is unafraid to challenge theatrical norms.
Compagnia Nous, an independent Italian theatre company who have taken to the international stage, reveals a momentous work and an immensely powerful text about Ada, a 40-year-old woman with early-onset dementia. The work is dedicated to a friend who recently passed and pulses with emotional intensity.
Despite a few technical hiccups, this very Italian play by Sara Esposito subbed in English, writhes and fights through mental health, tight political control and stands for those that society most often forgets. You may not always understand what is going on, but suspend your disbelief and the show sparkles in its own madness.
Ada (Sara Espocito) travels through her mind, a slave to the disease which makes her forget who she is and what she has been. She is locked in a hospital fighting Pietro (Sebastiano Gavasso), the hospital nurse who, in her mind, becomes her husband, who rails against her constant tantrums and her inability to stay still or behave in a way that the hospital expects of her.
Ada is drugged, restrained, fed soup or threatened with the hospital’s director, all to challenge the belief that the whole world is against her. We never know if what she imagines is actually true or whether the Severely Strict Director who comes knocking in her consciousness is just a stage direction, created by her mind.
The technical precision and display, despite early issues, is fantastic. Multi-coloured light dances and splutters across the stage in sections where we trek across Ada’s mind whilst she talks to Captain Kirk from Star Trek. She travels in different scenes through popular culture, popular music and irreverent Italian lyrics, in a defiant dance against her own brain, which transforms hospital workers into forces that control her. Whether or not the Central Inspectorate for Compliance that enters her mind is real or not, the moments of defiant beauty created by fighting him are present nonetheless.
The originality of the script, the performance of the actors and the message of overriding love — a stance of solidarity with all who are oppressed — is commendable. It’s a mad piece in which crazy has been turned all the way up. A woman’s spirit is tested again and again by an illness, but under such pressure, only her inextinguishable spirit shines through.
Runs until 5 September 2026
