Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Wednesday 20th September 2021.
Clock For No Time, written, directed, and narrated by Michele Saint-Yves, is the sort of play for which Rumpus was created. The venue is a malleable space with excellent technical equipment, a refashioning of a light industrial facility in the Bowden/Brompton redevelopment. It's dedicated to new writing.
Saint-Yves has an acquired brain injury and recently graduated as a medical professional in the field of medical neuroscience. She narrates much of the early part of the play in a quiet and measured fashion. The text appears on small screens at the front, and is Auslan signed by Carolyn Conlon, projected on the wall. While there is some movement into the audience by the cast of three, the main body of the play takes place on one long side of the room, a wall well-used by
Mark Oakley's projections. Set and costume design is by Bianka Kennedy.
While Paul Rechstein shuffles about as Ian, the father with dementia, and Jennifer Liston takes on small roles as a medical technician, and the mother and wife, pushed to the limits by her husband's condition, the work is carried intelligently by Jo Stone.
The play begins as Simone arrives for her annual scan. She has an acquired brain injury, a tumour deep in her head. The scan is a check on its progress. While in the MRI machine, she has a vision of her brain and the universe, bringing a strand of greater environmental consciousness and concern to the narrative. Stone's experience keeps you focussed. Her faultless delivery of the Saint-Yves text, there are lots of lists, keeps you attentive. It certainly touches on the personal response to life in a world challenged by climate concerns and the stress of the pandemic, but what comes across is something more akin to tenacity, holding on, day by day.
There is an added feature. Jennifer Liston's Galway accent is balm to the ears. She sings that famous song about memories to begin the show, and ends with Loch Lomond. I'm not sure if we should have sung along.
The program contains a lengthy manifesto, after Fiona McGregor's Dancefloor Manifesto, sighted in PerformanceWorksLIVE 2021. "We come here to break from isolation, for the glory of communing and to share breath, laughter, and tears - to make feel-good chemicals. We come because art is life. We come to create culture because life is art." That pretty much sums up theatre, and for those of us with experience of MRI machines and parental dementia, it's good to have this on stage. I do have a deeply held reservation about directors of their own work, but Michele Saint-Yves knows the story, and we hear and see it.
A lot of care has gone into making the play accessible to people with dementia, anxiety, and other conditions that might make theatre-going arduous. The website makes them explicit.
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