Chris Eldon Lee reviews Skimstone Arts’ ‘Jack and Jill and the Red Postbox’ which he saw at Shrewsbury’s Theatre Severn.
It’s when the red post box comes alive that the full incomprehensible horror of Alzheimer’s really hits home. Jill has only gone down the road to post a letter as she has thousands of times in her life – but now the illness has set in, the hallucinations begin, In a beautifully simple and elegant piece of stage craft the pillar box turns into a vengeful bright red drape that twists and swirls to envelope poor Jill. There are a number of dementia plays around at present but this is the most strikingly communicative of explanations of what it must be like to suffer.
The play is otherwise conducted almost entirely in psychiatric white. The two actor/musicians Claire Webster Saarements and Simon Tarrant play aging Jack and Jill and their son and daughter who, typically, are slow to pick up on Mum’s relentless deterioration as she stops driving, can’t find her keys and needs help to collect her pension.
Drawing upon original oral accounts, the descriptions are awfully authentic. Amidst the live family scenes, Claire performs video monologues that are so true they could barely have been invented. Dementia is like a train with the carriages “in all the wrong order”. It’s like watching a teacher wipe clean the blackboard of your life.
Much of show is simple and prosaic to the point of being slightly naïve….which actually adds to the overall charm. There are some subtlety sensitive scenes such as the dumb show of Jack and Jill’s early life in which a white bed sheet becomes her wedding dress and then their two babies. We share the helpless despair of her kids and husband and ultimately the whole show is haunted by the family’s pending burden. There were audible sobs from audience members who knew exactly what they were on about.
It’s never going to be BAFTA winning stuff; it’s too modest for that. But it is an arresting, heartfelt seventy minutes, which empathises with those in the know and illuminates those yet to know; and I came away feeling I had witnesses a thoroughly memorable piece of theatre.