- Venue
- Royal Opera House (Linbury Studio Theatre)
- Location
- London
I went to this opera a couple of months ago and although I found it very moving and knew I wanted to review it, it has taken me a while to get there. The fact that it is world Alzheimer’s day has just given me a reason to get on with it!
http://www.alz.org/news_and_events_world_alzheimer…
The name comes from the clinicial description of the Alzheimer face with features settling into “leonine impassivity.” Set in a care home, the opera tells the story of a man suffering from Alzheimer’s (starting with the first trigger of him forgetting his own birthday) and his ability to communicate is gradually lost throughout the piece. The audience is privy to both stories, that of the man and that of those around him trying to understand; the doctor, the carer, his wife and the carer’s daughter. His world becomes centred around certain personal events, objects or images, all from the past, until he is almost gone – just an empty shell of a human being. In the end it is the caretakers daughter that reaches out to the man, just by humouring him for a second (he thinks she is someone from his youth).
To accentuate this gulf in understanding, the man speaks his lines while those around him sing, a simple but very effective interpretation of the different language he speaks. I hardly noticed the music in one way, but I feel like that is because it fitted so well with events on stage. The set was a well observed clinical environment, devoid of much colour or detail and emphasised the faceless nature of the patient with this disease.
A large two-way projection screen at the back of the set served as a window for most of the performance, with snow falling, creating beautiful soft and rhythmic shadows on the cast. This section of the outside world present in the set also showed the real nature of the inside of the home – a place that the patient cannot leave, so looking out of the window is seen as longing to belong to the outside again. At times this window acted as a mirror to the man, in which he saw his younger self. At other times as he grasped for memories, it showed glimpses of them.
Despite the simplicity, tragedy and beauty of this work, it was not a sentimental take on Dementia, but a quiet and honest account of how it is. I speak from personal experience with my father, and of course that may colour the experience of the opera, but it captured well the hopelessness, the child-like nature of the patient, the frustration and anger at the patient for forgetting you and your life together as well as the comedy and absurdity that occur – like the moment when he wraps everything in the care home up as presents.
In a way one patient in the cast was not enough, although I understand he served as a symbol for all patients. It is the interaction between patients that fills most of their days after all and the time that (I saw) the most hilarious things occur. After the performance, there was a Q and A with the director, composer and someone from the Alzheimer Society (I think!?). The discussion was really interesting and they talked of the problem of bringing such a subject into contemporary opera and the doubts they had of finding an audience for the piece. Unfortunately I think there are plenty of people out there with experience of this disease who may have an interest in the work.
The pace of the opera is fairly pedestrian – not much happens in a way and there is little drama, but that is the way it goes. The drama is surely happening to those outside the care home, inside it there is just getting on, living day to day. In all, this was a moving, sensitive and intelligent work that I would love to see again.
