The Stage

Really Old, Like Forty Five

Published Monday 8 February 2010 at 11:40 by Ben Dowell

Sometimes news stories just fall into the lap of playwrights. On the opening night of Tamsin Oglesby’s impressively multi-layered new play, which explores the reality of Britain’s ageing population, a report published that day suggested that Britain was ignoring a dementia crisis.

Michela Meazza (Mimi) and Paul Ritter (Monroe) in Really Old, Like Forty Five at the National, Cottesloe Theatre Photo: Tristram Kenton

What Oglesby’s play imagines, however, is a far more ghastly future in which the elderly are not allowed to exist freely without earning points for good behaviour and a quasi-government organisation is planning a sinister new care home project called the Arc.

On a raised platform, suited Arc policy bureaucrat Monroe (Paul Ritter) spits and strategises as if the family we see in the pit below are marionettes, toys for his realpolitiking or guinea pigs snuffling dumbly around their cage.

But in fact they are just an ordinary group of people of varying ages but with typical concerns - so much so they open the play in the foyer of the National, deciding whether to return for the second half of a Shakespeare play. There’s Gawn Grainger’s jolly Uncle Robbie, who sports ripped jeans as symptom of what appears to be a mid-life crisis and teenage grandchild Dylan, who seems more interested in creating avatars for his computer game.

But when Robbie’s sister, Judy Parfitt’s beautifully-realised Lyn, starts forgetting certain key words, we realise that a potentially everyday occurrence effectively presages the end of her life, and it is this kind of creep of the truly horrific into the mundane which gives Oglesby’s impressive new work much of its frightening power, creating a clever and powerful satire which feels at the same time both eerily dystopian and scarily plausible.

The move to a hospital, the creation of experiments on family members and patients, the truth about Robbie and the arrival of an apparently calming robotic nurse takes us further into the abyss. But we are also reminded in Lucy May Barker’s quietly impressive pregnant teen mother Millie that it is not just the elderly who will fall further by the wayside if we’re not careful and that a cruel disregard for human life does not just belong to the pages of either science fiction or history.