It seems like a particularly apt moment to reflect on how we tend to our ageing society in the shadow of the recent strike actions by doctors and nurses. The focus of this drama on end-of-life experiences is not the dangerously overloaded NHS, though, but those caught in a desperately underresourced system for the care of elderly people.
A 75-minute show based on real-life testimonies, it dramatises the emotional trauma of ageing, illness and mortality and how this is compounded by a system that can barely meet basic human needs.
Conceived by Nir Paldi (also its original director) and directed by Helena Middleton, it is playful and plaintive, weaving together moments of light and dark through the stories of Margaret (Heather Williams), a local councillor who has a life-changing fall, and Norson (Kirris Riviere), a Black British driver who is diagnosed with early onset dementia. We follow them as they grapple with their loss of independence and their new, stripped-down identities, alongside family members and care staff. As the daughter of a father with dementia and a mother with a history of falls, I found this drama instantly recognisable and true, both in the struggles of its central characters and in the guilt, shock and sadness for their children.
Devised by a company of six actors who juggle roles, it tells much of its story in song and movement, and we go from the tragedy of the deathbed to bathos, and from a celebration of Margaret and Norson’s lives to the abject indignities of their sickbeds. Actors deliver lines in a witty a cappella chorus and move as a chorus, too, dropping to the ground or swirling around Norson as he stands in confusion and Margaret as she lies shouting for help at the foot of the stairs.
There is a fine creative economy in the way this drama captures its issues, but we also have a sense of wanting to delve further into the lives of Margaret and Norson as well as those around them. We see the compromises inevitably faced by the care workers (played by Clive Duncan, Elisabeth Gunawan and Robin Paley Yorke, among other characters) and momentarily glimpse their personal lives, which leave us curious. And there are subtle, and perhaps slightly too skating, references to how Norson’s experience, and that of his son Daniel (Jabari Ngozi), is racialised.
The two central stories are wonderfully interwoven, but their wide scope means we lose out on emotional depth. The drama stays in the mind nonetheless, and if the true measure of a society really is to be found in how it treats its most vulnerable, If You Fall makes us ruminate on just what a state we’re in.
• At the North Wall, Oxford, 19 and 20 April. Then touring.
