Really Old, Like Forty Five

Synopsis

You can sit there with your knit knit knitting but some of us have places to go, some of us are still ready to strip the light fandango before we shuffle off, so don't tell me what to do. There are just too many old people. As a government research body seeks to deal with the problems of a maturing population, a family addresses its own. Lyn’s memory starts to go, Alice takes a fall and even Robbie has to face the signs of ageing. Relations are put to the test across three generations. As are those who enter the increasingly sinister world of State Care. I don’t see how you can legislate for all old people this way. What’s the cut off? Tamsin Oglesby’s furious comedy confronts head-on our embarrassment and fear about old age. It exposes a society in which compassion vies with pragmatism and, by asking unequivocal questions, it comes up with some extraordinary answers. Oh they’d have a choice, yes. If they choose quality of life over cure. Quality of life has always been an option.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 4 February 2010

Timing is not always everything, but Tamsin Oglesby’s sharp as a tack new play could have been prescribed specifically to accompany Terry Pratchett’s headline-hogging plea for dignity in death by assisted suicide.

But instead of suggesting that old age alone is the cause of amnesia or Alzheimer’s, her play more interestingly broadens the scope of the argument to encompass the whole human condition.

Nobody’s perfect. Vacancy is as much a state of mind in the young as the old, and policy wonks are just as susceptible to tricks of perception as the batty old dear who thinks the hospital’s a hotel and that sex is like pantomime – “silly and rude, but at least it’s only once a year.”

Oglesby’s smart plays usually stem from one big idea: the vicissitudes of the beauty business, or the after effects of school bullying or, most recently, in The War Next Door, domestic violence as a paradigm of cultural conflict.

Here, the slippage of two old ...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 20 April 2010:

As someone who is really old, like 51 and feeling every day of it at the moment, Tamsin Oglesby's play is a look at a potentially grim future. Given the average age of a NT matinee audience I dread to think what they made of it. The play is a clever satire which just about manages not to fall into the trap of stretching the bounds of plausibility too far and it's also very funny in places - the comparison of sex to pantomime is brilliant. In an excellent cast it's a neat trick to cast Judy Parfitt as the sister with Alzheimer's and the wonderfully dotty Marcia Warren as the (marginally) more clued up sister; she also gets most of the funniest lines. Occasionally the moralising is far from subtle but this is a rewarding contribution to the highly topical debate on caring for the elderly and having the right to die with dignity. As just one example, Joanna Lumley has proposed an army of adoptive grandparents - just as in the play - and the idea of separate speed lanes foe pedestrians is brilliant, but then again I'm about as impatient as Gawn Grainger's cantankerous Robbie. I'm surprised at how many negative reviews this has received, I found it mostly enjoyable and quite provocative....

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