This stage version of Lisa Genova’s novel, which is best known from the 2014 movie version and Julianne Moore’s Oscar-winning performance as a 50-year-old Harvard professor with young-onset dementia, is part of the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s admirable Every Third Minute festival. The festival takes its name from the idea that every third minute, someone in the UK will begin living with dementia.
It’s a heartbreaking story, and the cast perform it with grace and commitment. No one more so than Sharon Small, who, in a wonderfully unguarded performance, captures the increasing frustration and panic of a capable woman. As the illness takes hold, she gets lost in her own house and goes to work in her dressing gown. “I miss myself,” she says simply.
This is a show with none of the theatrical complexity of Florian Zeller’s The Father, which cleverly used form and language to make the audience feel the anxiety of dementia. Despite giving Alice an on-stage inner voice called Herself (Ruth Gemmell), Christine Mary Dunford’s adaptation is a pedestrian, flat affair that charts Alice’s decline with minimum drama and one eye on the heartstrings.
All the other characters are underwritten, and the rare genetic component of Alice’s illness and its implications for her children and grandchild are touched on only in a throwaway line. Alice’s husband, John (Dominic Mafham), is a less successful academic than his wife, and his late chance for career advancement as his wife becomes incapacitated goes emotionally underexplored. It is an evening where it’s the subject matter rather than its staging that moves us to tears.
- At the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until 3 March. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
