Review: GROW UP GRANDAD at Domain Theatre, Marion Cultural Centre

Grow Up Grandad, by British writer Gordon Steel, is a modest play, sentimental without being mawkish, and in Warren McKenzie’s direction fits neatly on the Domain Theatre stage. Mackenzie’s small cast fits neatly into the story.

As Poppy, in the program Poppy Senior, looks back thirty years, we meet her fourteen-year-old self being collected from school, not by her mother, to whom she’s devoted, but by her grandfather. Where is her mother? That’s a mystery to be unfolded. The audience already has a suspicion.

Young Poppy stages a scene at the school gates, calling out that this old man is trying to abduct her. She’s a clever little minx indeed. She hates her Grandad’s house. It smells, like him, of old things. Since his wife died, he’s simplified domesticity. He has no television, no internet. He has jigsaw puzzles. When he invites Poppy to assemble one with him, she firmly turns him down. She’ll never do a jigsaw puzzle with him.  Spoiler alert; the jigsaw puzzle is a mega-metaphor.

Enter two other characters. Poppy’s aunt Margaret has flown up to Newcastle. She’s a brittle, stylish woman who has left her past behind. She’s now on her local Council as a, gasp, horror, Conservative. The other woman is the Social Worker. Apparently, there to help, you get a strong sense she wants to rescue young Poppy as a project.

We are told that Poppy’s mother was killed by a car. She was out shopping, and the accident occurred. Poppy is not allowed to join Grandad at the funeral.

Playwright Steel builds much humour into the story. There’s a really funny sequence when the pair go roller skating, and we see and hear that Grandad can’t roller skate and can fart noisily. It’s a fun and farcical moment.

Let’s talk about the actors, shall we? Zoe Battersby is spot on as Young Poppy. She’s just fifteen as it is, but this is an auspicious debut. Malcolm Walton is beautifully cast as Grandad, caring and irascible. He shields Poppy from the truth. Linda Lawson carries off an impressive double as Poppy Senior and the Tory-voting Aunt Margaret. Kaitlyn Meadows is Genevieve, the social worker, and you do get the sense of her devious nature. There are also, at least to my ears, some very effective Geordie accents on display.

In the second half of the play, we are up to date with Poppy Senior’s timeline. She’s brought Grandad on holiday to a nice hotel with a comfortable armchair. It’s pretty clear that his dementia has set in and he’s being moved into care. The set splits down the middle, with Grandad’s lounge on one side, and the blue and yellow care ward on the other. Malcolm Walton moves from one to the other, timeline to timeline, mental state to mental state, with great skill. We finally learn the truth about Poppy’s mother’s death, and Steel adds another twist, putting the story we have watched unfold, into a new perspective.

Finally, as the lights go down, Poppy joins him doing what her younger self vowed would never happen. You’ve guessed it, doing a jigsaw puzzle with her Grandad.

I found there was much to identify with in this play; the challenge of dealing with parental dementia for one thing, but early in the play Grandad gives his opinion that young tearaways and thieves shouldn’t be taken to court. He’d just shoot them outright. I’ve been saying that for quite a few years.