Still Alice
Christine Mary Dunford may have adapted Lisa Genova’s novel a year before Julianne Moore’s Oscar winning performance, but the film version nevertheless casts a long shadow over this UK revival. Given that Alice Howland’s battle with dementia has been already exposed to the widest of audiences, director David Grindley is forced to serve two masters. The play clearly has to present a coherent narrative to those new to the story, but those that have come having already read the book or seen the film (surely the majority) might have expected an entirely new and more challenging spin on the issues raised, something Dunford at the time of writing didn’t need to address. Stuck with the text as written, it’s perhaps not surprising that Grindley has leaned towards coherence at the expense of invention, but the result is, albeit well-meaning, a tad underwhelming.
Sharon Small’s central performance was powerful, authentic and convincing, and far and away the best thing about this production. She was ably complemented by Eva Page as her inner voice - essentially the theatrical equivalent of a voice over. Page articulated what Small’s character is thinking when no one is prepared to listen to her. A device first used in Passion Play back in the early eighties, this went some way to mimicking the single perspective of Genova’s book, and was occasionally very effective at articulating Alice’s internal conflict. However, the concept was never fully developed, with this alternate self frequently standing in for little more than a Greek Chorus. More damaging, and unlike the play’s source, we also bore witness to the thoughts and feelings of her husband and children, so that we frequently paid more attention to them than her. Nicely underplayed by Martin Marquez and Ruth Ollman, father and daughter seemed too often the voices of reason, so that as an audience we, fatally, sought explanation and rationale from them, not Alice, and thereby became complicit it setting to one side her increasingly distorted perspective.
Had the family been more fully realised dramatically, this could have made for an alternative, but perfectly legitimate, take on the narrative. To explicitly examine the effect that the illness had on the family, rather than on Alice, would have been a creative way to take the book and make something new out of it (it is something the film version does do to an extent). However, the subsidiary characters of the play were too broadly drawn, and their circumstances too sketchily mapped out, for the audience to have cared very much about the husband passing up on promotion, or the daughter finally getting the lead in a play. The result was a distancing from an anguish that is deduced rather than felt, and made for a curiously bloodless and detached experience.
The production did offer up some interesting staging choices. A wide screen projection of subtly shifting washes of colour, overlaid with an expository timeline, dominated proceedings from above. It was a simple device that effectively illustrated the agonisingly slow development of Alice’s illness. A cluttered stage was gradually denuded of detail, and therefore context, which went someway to illustrating Alice’s fragmented grip on her surroundings. By way of contrast, one of the most naturalistic scenes proved to be the most effective. With the audience temporarily standing in for attendees at a lecture about her condition, Alice spoke directly and movingly to us about what her condition meant to her, how much it meant to speak out, and how she would, almost certainly, immediately forget that she had done so. It was a standout moment that only made you wish that David Grindley had worked harder to exploit the live, theatrical experience.
It should be said that Grindley’s production concepts did eventually come together, albeit in the final moments of the play. In the closing scene, we witnessed Martin Marquez and Sharon Small sat together on a stage that was bare but for two garden chairs, unrecognisable as the beach house they were supposedly staying at. Perhaps for the first time, were transported to somewhere more akin to Alice’s experience of the world, the backdrop of blues and greens serving as the dream like limbo she now occupied. As Sharon Small stared vacantly out into the space, Eva Page (significantly distanced from the body of Alice at the very edge of the stage) spoke wistfully of the pleasant stranger that smiled and spoke to her tenderly in a scene drenched in a sadness and a poignancy that came not from cathartic high drama, but from the melancholy of something lost forever.
