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Show: The Other Place
Society: Park Theatre (professional)
Venue: Park200, Park Theatre, Clifton Terrace, Finsbury Park, London N4 3JP
Credits: By Sharr White. A Park Theatre and Theatre by the Lake co-production in association with Abinger Productions
Type: Sardines
Author: Chris Abbott
Performance Date: 24/09/2018
The Other Place
Chris Abbott | 25 Sep 2018 10:45am
Juliana lectures confidently to us, with the audience playing the role of academics at a medical conference, hearing about the latest treatments for dementia. She is practised and expert at the process but gradually we realise that not everything is as it should be. We meet members of her family and see events happening in her life, but always through her eyes and from her perspective. In a cruel twist of fate this researcher into dementia is herself suffering from the early onset of the condition at the age of 61.
Apart from Juliana’s husband Ian, played most sensitively and with a sad mix of exasperation and devotion by Neil McCaul, the other characters, listed as Man and Woman in the programme, are all conjured up by Juliana from her memory, with those from long ago appearing alongside others with whom she has interacted more recently. Rupinder Nagra is the post-doc student who betrayed Juliana’s trust by seducing her young daughter – at least that is how Juliana remembers it – and in a neat twist he also plays a carer looking after Juliana in the present day.
As the daughter Laurel who left home long ago, the brisk doctor who provides Juliana with her diagnosis and the latest inhabitant of the Cape Cod house that gives the play its title, Eliza Collings is wholly convincing and heart-rending by turns. Framing the whole piece however, and the conduit for everything we see, is the stunning Karen Archer as Juliana, surely an award-winning performance. At times it is as if we see right into her mind as she grapples with how to know what is real and what is not, what is happening now and what was happening long ago. In The Other Place Sharr White has written a complex interweaving text which enables Juliana to tell and show us what is happening to her.
Claire van Kampen provides a sure touch as Director, ensuring that the story is told but also that we understand, slowly, that there is no clear distinction here between reality and memory, or between then and now. The production is greatly enhanced by sound, lighting and by Jonathan Fensom’s deceptively simple set, a blank canvas in which small elements of the past can be glimpsed, whether that be a staircase or the well-remembered Other Place, the Cape Cod house where so many of Juliana’s memories, good and bad, are located with its distinctive door colour and design.
The presentation slides discussed by Juliana are blank of course, as is so much of her memory, but when we finally discover the source of the imagined girl in a yellow bikini, the memory is portrayed in blurred video which fades and and is wiped away just as it is about to become clearer; a beautiful metaphor for the central issue in the play.
It is an intense and engrossing 90 minutes, quite rightly played without a break, and entirely suited to the intimate and effective larger space at the Park Theatre, Park 200. As Juliana says towards the end of the play, “Not being myself is who I am.” It is hard to think of a better example of the dramatic exploration of the realities of dementia; it is an important, gripping and insightful play.
- : admin
- : 24/09/2018