Still Life Dreaming

On 4 June 1947, almost every Scottish schoolchild born in 1936 sat an intelligence test. Nearly 60 years later, after the original results were rediscovered in a dusty archive, 1091 of them re-sat the same test. The 1936 Lothian Birth Cohort, as they became known, would help trigger further research into the brain and how thinking skills alter with age and other socio-economic influences.

It’s an interesting set-up, but one that unforgivably fails to translate into any semblance of insightful drama through Pete Lawson’s flaccid script that continuously inserts bland platitudes and gnomic wisdom of the “every journey begins with a single step” variety into the actors’ mouths.

Instead of any meaningful excavation of the mind and our understanding of it, we’re offered some of the “human stories” surrounding the test. Except, they’re presented by the cast of four principal actors as a series of unrevealing hammy skits featuring characters painted in the broadest of brush strokes.

When Sir Henry Wellcome—comedy facial hair and silly walk both present and correct—saunters in to make a pitch for the work his no doubt excellent charity is doing posthumously, you get the impression Still Life Dreaming is running out of ideas fast.

In the absence of any headline findings beyond the obvious, the play’s conclusions, verbatim or otherwise, are insultingly condescending (“Age is just a number”; “Age only matters if you’re a cheese”) and when one character utters, with revelatory insight, “everything is connected”, you only wish that were true of the various components of this play.