How do you dramatise dementia? Not easily. But Sharr White, in a play first staged off-Broadway in 2011, handles the subject tactfully by seeing events from the perspective of a woman experiencing cognitive difficulties. The result is compassionate and informative even if there is an inescapable clash between the subjective and objective points of view.
White’s protagonist, Juliana, is a high-powered medical figure who breaks down while giving a lecture at a neurological conference. We sense her disorientation, fear and fixation, even while she is on the podium, with the image of a young girl in a yellow bikini. In subsequent scenes we see Juliana’s resistance to treatment, anger with her attentive husband and conviction that her estranged daughter is trying to make contact with her.
The play unsentimentally shows that cerebral collapse may lead to aggression rather than a docile passivity. The difficulty is that, whereas a novel can easily take you inside the mind of an individual, a play requires a good deal of objective fact. A masterpiece such as Hamlet may be able to reconcile the two but White’s play sometimes switches awkwardly between the internal and external worlds. We are inside Juliana’s consciousness when she publicly collapses. Later, in the Cape Cod retreat that gives the play its title, we view her differently as a bereft intruder.
White has, however, created a beautifully taxing role and Karen Archer gives a fine performance that convinces you of Juliana’s intellectual prowess while also showing her rage, perplexity and confusion at a world that no longer makes sense to her. Archer is well supported in director Claire van Kampen’s unostentatious production by Neil McCaul as her baffled husband and by Eliza Collings as a trio of women who exist in her present and past. Although it steers towards a feelgood conclusion, it is a sympathetic play that does its bit to enhance our understanding.
• At Park theatre, London, until 20 October.
