Tomorrow

Unadjusted as lots of us are, it is joyous to see a play about old age, about dementia, that is both serious and hilarious. The much-lauded Vanishing Point Theatre Company stage Tomorrow, a visionary sideways glance into the spiralling effects of dementia. The weighty issue is made buoyant again by the chatter of care home staff, whose work it is to get by on helping others get by.

The show explores the terror of losing oneself with a swiftness and ease that is horribly, feasibly potent. Our young protagonist, George (Samuel Keefe), could be anyone in this theatre's audience. To experience dementia for us all, he is stripped naked by a hospital team during what should be a trip to visit his newborn daughter. Instead, a mask is forced over his head and George enters late life, now trapped in his mind.

What happens next is provocative—the care home workers play a game of "Which Would You Rather Shag, If You HAD To?"—as well as riotously comedic, while being full of the sensitivity and despair of a care home. Residents race each other, on zimmer frames, to arm chairs; they put on coats and head to thought-up appointments; they wet themselves and pass away. The Traverse's audience has before them a set of characters richly interconnected by Pamela Carter's text and straightforwardly staged by Vanishing Point. It's all elegantly, yet experimentally, washed in light and shade by Kai Fischer's lighting and cleverly realised in Matthew Lenton's direction, adding up to what will surely be recognised as an integral spectacle of this year's Fringe.