Andre is a retired engineer; a literate, eloquent, somewhat forceful personality but a man of considerable charm and humour.  

Andre finds himself inhabiting a dislocated nightmare filled with unfamiliar places, unexpected threats and unknown faces. This isn’t the urbane, civilised bourgeois world Andre knows. Darkness is overwhelming him but Lear-like he’ll defy it.

Can the real impact of dementia on an individual ever be satisfactorily conveyed within the span of a comparatively short play? [More] 

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Dementia and its manifestation in wretchedly degenerative Alzheimer’s is increasingly the subject of medical enquiry and explanation. The experience of sharing through theatre a vividly imagined world where dementia rules, is something else again.  

Director Simon Bennett, his strong cast and an expressive production team (set, costume, lighting and sound by Nigel Kerr, Deborah Moor, Giles Tanner and Hamish Oliver respectively) draw us deep into the emotional turmoil of lives where reality itself can no longer be taken for granted.  

The play is cunningly structured so that we, the audience, are also left questioning what we saw and heard just moments ago. Situations we thought we had understood, turn into something else, or are recycled so that we are no further ahead, only deeper in the realisation that something is not adding up.  

That, of course is the predicament for the titular character, André, suffering from steadily worsening dementia as the repercussions of his condition force him into permanent care. His daughter, Anne has tried carer after carer, but the ageing ex-engineer is simply unmanageably ‘eccentric’ and his difficult prolonged stay with her has to be resolved.  

Initially it is easy enough to chuckle at the misunderstandings, memory lapses and petty obsessions André lives by. Even the frustrations and startled reactions of Anne, or the efforts of the latest carer to ingratiate herself to this difficult patient, are darkly comic. Not for long. “The shadows are gathering,” he says, in a flash of lucidity. The stage, which began as a comfortably furnished apartment gradually empties, reflecting the vacuum which threatens his mind, and the ultimate reality of his plight is both pitiable and deeply disturbing.  

On the way to this final clarity we experience something of André’s own confusion in evolving stages. Faces are a problem, and furniture. Folk who should be familiar to him, such as Anne and her husband, are not always recognised. One such recurring character voices the fear in his own mind that he is “making a tit” of himself and does so with increasingly sinister intensity. The last perfunctory appearance of ‘A Man’, now clearly a doctor, is especially chilling.  

The cast never falters in establishing André’s shadowy world, their presence always overlaid by his perception. Ailis Oliver-Kerby’s eager young carer Laura, Kim Garrett, simply designated ‘A Woman’, appearing in several compassionate roles, and Owen Black as the mysterious ‘A Man’, are all effective in the challenge.

As Anne’s husband, Pierre, Tom Trevella contributes sturdy ‘common sense’ in comforting her. “He’s ill” offers a palatable explanation for the horror of her father’s disintegrating personality. To be happy, together and alive around a meal table is the moment which matters.

Coping emotionally and in practical terms with André’s condition has Anne, played compellingly by the insightful Luanne Gordon, run ragged. She is required to operate much of the time in André’s distorted world where she is frequently dismissed as not being his other daughter, the one he loved, or in being “just like [her] mother’. Somehow she must also fulfil the day-to-day practicalities of the household and organise carers. The pain of her exhaustion and frustration are sensitively conveyed.

The central focus of the production though is on André and the complexities of his character are what drives the escalating intensity of the play. Mark Hadlow’s experience and quicksilver talents underpin a memorable creation. André’s isolation, his inevitable irrationality and his valiant struggle to make sense of a world where nothing, not even time or what happened moments ago, is certain, is almost unbearably moving. Seeking to understand who he is and what is happening, he creates endless explanations, invents a past where none now exists for him and all the while suffers the horrible pain of isolation. He does not share what everyone around him understands until the last moments of the play, when Lear-like, he is reduced to the basic need for comfort and loving arms.

The production is testing for those in the audience as well as those on stage. Undertaken with humour, compassion and humanity, it illuminates brilliantly areas of emotional experience all too often unexpressed.

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