Demented, Ruth Pieloor in association with Rebus Theatre, The Q, 17-20 Aug

 Ruth Pieloor's new play explores the path of dementia in a way that's all-too familiar to those who've had a family member slowly drift away - the distractability, the argumentativeness, the frustrations and the fleeting joys of reconnecting. As someone who's last experience was almost two decades ago (when my grandmother passed) it feels true and deeply felt. And there's a strong central thread of four generations of women trying to handle caring for one another in the face of tragedy. 

There's a lot of bonus meta-theatre thrown in here that doesn't always connect cleanly to the main thread - in particular, elements of clowning (which mostly serves to make the scene changes go a little longer, and always feels like it's leaning on the side of cute rather than anarchic), and elements of Japanese bunraku puppetry (which is beautiful but never quite achieves the "angel of death" feeling that the published script seems to think the figure should). It's a show that works better in the second half than the first - the first seems full of day-to-day scenes that mostly restate the same set of frustrations between Maggie, a former circus performer living with dementia, and Rachel her mature adult daughter who finds herself having to guide her mother through a second childhood, while the second is where the rubber hits the road and the downward spiral starts working outwards across the rest of the family.

The four performers all have strengths to them - Chrissie Shaw's strength as the often-frustrating Maggie sticking to her guns in the face of everything her family tries to help her feels infused with truth, though there's a tendency for her to play cute to the audience more than is strictly necessary. Heidi Silberman does a fair bit with a role that could be stuck in a rut of frustrated sighs and general irritation - playing in the space between frustration and love. Rachel Pengilly gives young widowed mother Kat a very real sense of conflicted loyalties between her cyclone of a daughter and the emotional labour of her mother and grandmother. And Carolyn Eccles gives 5-year-old Emily a sly sense of chaos and wild enthusiasm - physically giving herself over to the disruptive nature of a small child pushing their boundaries.

Ali Clinch's staging feels a tad too busy for the material, splaying across the width of the Q's stage with multiple moving elements when a bit of stillness and focus may have served it better - allowing a steady sense of place to be disrupted by chaos more often, rather than having the disruption just be part of the usual style of the presentation. Bret Olzen's Auslan interpretation is an interesting addition, though having him isolated to a single point on the stage does make me doubt how useful this is for Auslan users when performers are on one far side of the stage and he's far on the other - are they able to follow both the physical action of the actors and the interpretation? 

This piece is clearly a labour of love for its production team, and there's a lot to appreciate. I do think there's a deeper play here that's lost a little in the accompanying decoration and busyness of the production, but you can still see the heart and soul of it.