This is the story of an elderly d/Deaf man who arrives at a hospice with dementia to see out his last days. Nothing much happens, outwardly. Ramesh Meyyappan’s astonishing play builds its power on the drama of this man’s inner confusions, with memories crashing in on reality and hallucinations intruding into his everyday space.
It plays out like a thriller, with Harry (Meyyappan) its existential detective, trying to piece together his life story, from the death of his wife (Amy Kennedy) to her recurring reappearances, which appear like unsettling, yet alluring, fragments of a puzzle.
Meyyappan, a Glasgow-based Singaporean d/Deaf writer and actor conveys just how alarming it is to have dementia, all the more so when you are d/Deaf and your only nurse (Elicia Daly) cannot use BSL. He brings a beautifully subtle strain of physical theatre to his performance so you see every fleck of his fear and frustration.
Staged as part of the Made in Scotland showcase, it is stupendously directed by Matthew Lenton, and enacts the beguiling fantasies that suck Harry into his lost past and the thundering shock when they melt away.
This is partly done with a mirror across the stage, (set design by Becky Minto) which plays out the distorted or unreliable visions that dementia can bring, implicating us, the audience, too by reflecting our images back to ourselves.
It becomes a metaphor for how Harry is at a remove from himself, as if seeing his life through a pane of glass, but a parallel world emerges on the other side too. The visual hallucinations of Harry’s wife are both romantic and creepy, and there are sinister visual effects around the appearance of the younger Harry (Rinkoo Barpaga), as the older man stands stricken and angered by this unrecognisable version of himself.
Harry’s room is sparsely furnished with a table, armchair and a tower of pebbles which set off happy memories and he clutches them as if they are solid, graspable pieces of the past. A piano score along with an electric, eerie soundscape (music composed by David Paul Jones) convey the emotions of his illness.
There are no captions with the signing on stage, which becomes a clever way of placing a hearing audience in Harry’s shoes: we cannot understand this language and can only guess what is being said, or look on with confusion. A play about love, death and communication, it is not an easy watch but an incredibly moving one.
