Writer and Director: Lucy Campbell
The Performance Ensemble is an older person-led arts and social change organisation, committed to tackling ageism. A previous encounter with their work, in Doncaster, was strangely uplifting, with 20-plus people of different levels of competence, a number of them in wheel chairs, telling their stories.
This is quite different. The five performers – Peter Bartram, Bill McCarthy, Marlene Thomas, Maureen Willis and Marcia Wright – are all accomplished. Lucy Campbell has structured a piece that wittily examines – above all – the ageing person’s body image, though the readiness of the men to strip off down to the waist suggests they have no problems on that score! It’s very clever, with Theatre of the Absurd-style interaction between cast, stage crew and sound technician and a slick soundtrack, but less uplifting than its predecessor.
One of the women begins by telling of her teenage experience, in Art class in Headingley, of drawing from the life an elderly woman who oddly then examined all the class’s work. This sets the theme for the evening. She recently saw Rodin’s “The Helmet Maker’s Wife – she who was once…” in the Burrell Collection and was instantly reminded of the Headingley experience. Then attention switches to another woman who thinks the old should be invisible and who tries variations on the Rodin sculpture to the fury of a man – later described by himself as “a grumpy old man”. The theme of trying different images as the other women try to break down her sense of inferiority recurs throughout the evening.
The theme gets buried under assorted dances and digressions. The guide on How to Flirt for the Older Person is a joy and the grumpy old man suddenly transforms himself to the tune of “The Great Pretender” – cool white jacket and all.
Eventually the curtain that has cut off the back of the stage opens to reveal performers acting normally, irrespective of the passing of years: the other man still has a go at football, the other woman has her fitness regime, and so on. Isolated from them is the woman who has tried pictures on for size. Then comes a key moment for the “intergenerational collaboration between The Performance Ensemble and Leeds City College” – a girl, a member of the Stage Crew, confesses her own obsession with a single line on her forehead, then it’s all downhill from there: the woman appears on film walking out of the Playhouse and soon the stage is covered in paper aeroplanes aimed at the images of men and women tacked up on the wall.
The message is there – the ripeness is all.
A final word for The Bramall Rock Void, dug deep into the space below Leeds Playhouse. It seems like a throwback to the early years of studio theatres and is ideal for a production like this.
Runs until 16th November 2024.
