A Day in November

When you’re over 100 years old, you tend to forget names and faces – even your own. However, there are certain things one is determined to remember.

This is a melancholy puppet show for adults. The marionette who plays the Old Man has a pleasing physicality and a face it’s impossible not to love. Rumen Gavanozov’s puppetry is subtle and affecting. He casts himself as a faintly embarrassed carer, annoyed by the Old Man’s tendency to fall asleep and interrupt the story. It’s a shrewd reinterpretation of the dependent nature of many elderly people.

A Day in November is primarily a study of age and memory: how forgetfulness forces us to redefine objects and ourselves. It can be very powerful. Images such as the Old Man staring at a tuba—oblivious to what it once meant to him—are moving.

Yet, in much the same way that elderly relatives can invoke annoyance (and subsequent guilt at these feelings), the Old Man tries the audience’s patience. His small noises and repetitive speech quickly grow exasperating. At one point, even Gavanozov takes to drinking onstage, calling the Old Man names with a nasty edge.

The approach makes a point about how we treat our elders, but doesn’t make enduring it less irritating. This isn’t helped by the cramped theatre and deafening noise of another show booming through the walls.

If anything, A Day in November is too successful in replicating this particularly awkward relationship. Throughout, the Old Man keeps declaring that “This is a day worth remembering”. Unfortunately, A Day in November is not.