There have been some deeply moving films and plays about dementia. Iris chronicled the real-life degeneration of novelist Iris Murdoch. Still Alice focussed on the horrors of early-onset Alzheimer’s. And perhaps most powerful of all, The Father painted a terrifyingly convincing portrait of the experience of dementia itself, as the audience experiences the same loosening grip on reality as its octogenarian central character.
But, for young people, it’s still a far-off disease: one to worry about decades in the future. Not now. Not when there are bops to go to, disses to write, hearts to break. Please not now. Alzheimer’s is for grannies.
Enter Oliver Martin, who asks the unthinkable question: what if it wasn’t?
The idea is disarmingly simple. You Got Me asks: what would it be like if people got Alzheimer’s in their twenties? And after an emotionally draining hour in the Burton Taylor, the panic and disorientation of this unforgiving plague feel closer and more relevant to young lives than ever before.
Cohen Rowland (‘Alex’) and Charlie Heath (‘River’) play two young students who meet in a room that contains a couple of chairs, a rug and some books. They don’t know why they’re there or where they are. They don’t seem able to leave. And gradually, as they descend further and further into spirals of repetition and verbal nonsense, the few things they have are taken from them. Like The Father, this is dementia from the inside. We don’t see any family members or care home staff discussing Alex and River, or worrying about them. We’re in their heads looking out: puzzled, panicked and perpetually repeating the same words. The only other character is ‘The Figure’: a black-clad, silent presence, who calmly removes the books and furniture, dimly glimpsed by the two sufferers.
For such an artificial scenario, it’s a disturbingly authentic experience. But the real dramatic revelation is that, on stage, and performed by two young men, dementia is remarkably similar to Absurd Theatre. The sense of detachment, the extended forays into parlour games and half-memories, the occasional doomed efforts to escape: all of these feel so close in style and tone to Waiting for Godot that it’s tempting to see Beckett’s work as a metaphor for dementia itself. His characters too constantly repeat themselves and wonder whether they've met before. And like Beckett, Martin’s script frequently takes us into dead ends filled with oddly poetic revelation: Charlie Chaplin described as a circus clown doomed to perform the same tricks for eternity; the care home summed up as ‘fun purgatory’: a perfect image for Estragon and
There are moments of clarity, and in You Got Me these are provided by River quoting from Shakespeare, especially – and appropriately – King Lear describing his state as being ‘bound upon a wheel of fire’. These little islands of imprinted text are like life rings thrown to a drowning man: unbroken little blocks of memory that hold together even when everything connecting them has gone. If I may introduce a personal touch, my own mother is currently in a care home with Alzheimer’s, and even when she doesn’t know who you are, where she is, or what she said thirty seconds ago, if you say, ‘The King doth keep his revels here tonight’, she will be off, reciting the entire Puck speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and finishing with forming her hands into a pillow as she says, ‘all their elves for fear, Creep into acorn cups and hide them there’. An audition piece? A school play? When all else is gone, clusters of deeply embedded words remain, tied together by rhyme and childhood.
The most noticeable aspect of River’s and Alex’s growing disorientation is their tendency to mix up words – specifically to swap initial letters in a kind of aimless malapropism. In my experience of dementia, word-jumbling is part of the process, but not always so dominant; anxiety and short-term memory loss often loom larger. Alex and River certainly cope with these too, but the malapropisms may be slightly disproportionate.
50% of the profits from You Got Me are being donated to the Alzheimer’s Society. But it deserves to raise awareness as well as funds. It’s a unique and sobering watch, bringing the suffering of the elderly into the world of the young. The most relevant line from King Lear is the one they never say, but it’s there all along: ‘The oldest hath borne most. We that are young shall never see so much nor live so long.’