Miss Myrtle’s Garden at Bush Theatre – review

It’s rare for an early play by a young author to be about dementia – rarer still that it should display as much compassion and understanding as Danny James King’s Miss Myrtle’s Garden.

Powered by a remarkable central performance by Diveen Henry as the titular Myrtle, an 82-year-old whose world is as clearly populated by memory and ghosts as it is by the geraniums and hydrangeas that grow in her garden, this is a work of great talent, full of wit and vitality as well as feeling.

The Bush’s incoming artistic director Taio Lawson’s direction ramps up the drama and mystery from the very beginning. Khadija Raza’s set is a circle of grass surrounded by flowerbeds; overhead is a disc of light which Joshua Gadsby fills with glowering, changing colours, plunging from brilliant kaleidoscopes into black. Dan Balfour’s score is a jumble of sound, snatches of dialogue, and strains of songs.

This is Miss Myrtle’s kingdom which she rules with an imperious, acid tongue. “Your best and my best are not the same,” she tells her husband Melrose (Mensah Bediako) as he tries to do a spot of weeding. But it soon becomes clear that her grasp on reality is slipping. When her grandson Rudy and his friend Jason move in to save money, they are soon faced with the problem of what to do with someone who is both formidable and ill.

There’s also a melancholy Irish neighbour Eddie (Gary Lilburn), lonely since the death of his wife, who looks after the garden and Myrtle, though always on her terms. “It’s Miss Myrtle, Eddie, me and you is not family,” she tells him when he joins in a joke.

The play’s tone swerves between naturalism and fantasy, and as King tries to cram a lot in, it doesn’t quite hit all its targets. Lawson’s direction sometimes makes it feel over-portentous. But the writing is perceptive as well as humorous; there’s a sense of lives being lived.

Rudy and Jason are lovers, but Rudy, grappling with his own father’s death as well as his grandmother’s dementia, is reluctant to tell anyone the truth. Michael Ahomka-Lindsay and Elander Moore convincingly conjure the tensions this causes, while also managing to embody the affection between the pair. Lilburn and Bediako also convey a powerful sense of men seeking to adapt to Myrtle’s orbit, of trimming their love for her in response to her resilient sense of herself.

But it’s Henry who holds the piece together, issuing commands and rules of living (“being difficult is better than being easy”) with impeccable timing but also a moving sense of a woman gradually losing grip on a kingdom and a family she has ruled with her own sense of right and wrong. “Getting hard was the only way I could hold onto my dignity,” she says, when she explains why she has never mourned the death of her son.

A shadow of sadness passes over her face as she talks, plucking at her dress, before pulling herself up to her full height and resuming her reign. It’s all that’s unspoken as well as the words that make King’s play so heartbreaking.