Still Alice at the West Yorkshire Playhouse
Over the weekend, we saw Still Alice at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. in Leeds.
Based on the award-winning 2007 novel of the same title by Lisa Genova, Still Alice depicts the life of Alice Howland, a 50-year-old Harvard professor throughout her descent into the holds of Alzheimer's disease.
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We begin with a cluttered stage and Alice and her inner-self, (played out on stage as a character who talks directly to Alice), while she and her family are rushing about their lives as usual.
Soon, however, Alice begins to suspect that something wrong as she finds it difficult to recall memories. The main character is portrayed sympathetically by Sharon Small, who takes us on a journey through frustration, denial, panic, and anger at a loss of self.
A large screen is wrapped around the back of the stage, displaying the month between scenes, reminding the audience of how quickly the disease can take hold, and with each monthly change, parts of the stage are taken away, until right at the very end we're left just with Alice and her husband on two chairs, alone with the audience, representing the loss of self that Alice suffers, going from busy career-driven mother to being stripped to having almost nothing.
There are some truly heartfelt moments, at one stage, Alice says "I miss myself", a quietly devastating line that carries so much in three words. Later, Alice's son panics and wants to rearrange his life amidst getting married and becoming a father to spend more time with his mother, after she has a moment of forgetting her own daughter.
Although there has been some criticism of the play skimming over the emotions of the secondary characters, like Alice's daughter being diagnosed with having the same mutated gene as her mother, and the guilt Alice's husband must have felt forwarding his career in the midst of his wife's diagnosis. These aspects of the secondary characters were largely unexplored, but any addition would only have added to the depth of the story, but overall I thought that the whole show was fantastic, I left telling the my partner that we need to go to the theatre more often.
9/10
Based on the award-winning 2007 novel of the same title by Lisa Genova, Still Alice depicts the life of Alice Howland, a 50-year-old Harvard professor throughout her descent into the holds of Alzheimer's disease.
SourceWe begin with a cluttered stage and Alice and her inner-self, (played out on stage as a character who talks directly to Alice), while she and her family are rushing about their lives as usual.
Soon, however, Alice begins to suspect that something wrong as she finds it difficult to recall memories. The main character is portrayed sympathetically by Sharon Small, who takes us on a journey through frustration, denial, panic, and anger at a loss of self.
A large screen is wrapped around the back of the stage, displaying the month between scenes, reminding the audience of how quickly the disease can take hold, and with each monthly change, parts of the stage are taken away, until right at the very end we're left just with Alice and her husband on two chairs, alone with the audience, representing the loss of self that Alice suffers, going from busy career-driven mother to being stripped to having almost nothing.
There are some truly heartfelt moments, at one stage, Alice says "I miss myself", a quietly devastating line that carries so much in three words. Later, Alice's son panics and wants to rearrange his life amidst getting married and becoming a father to spend more time with his mother, after she has a moment of forgetting her own daughter.
Although there has been some criticism of the play skimming over the emotions of the secondary characters, like Alice's daughter being diagnosed with having the same mutated gene as her mother, and the guilt Alice's husband must have felt forwarding his career in the midst of his wife's diagnosis. These aspects of the secondary characters were largely unexplored, but any addition would only have added to the depth of the story, but overall I thought that the whole show was fantastic, I left telling the my partner that we need to go to the theatre more often.
9/10
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