BWW Reviews: AUTOBIOGRAPHER, Toynbee Studios, April 20 2012

In a room, darkened and shrouded on all sides by thick black curtains, one sits in the circle familiar as the setting for therapy and then women speak - first here, then there, then here again - and sounds move around as lights dim and brighten and words flow, then stop, then repeat, then flow and now the women are moving around, swapping chairs and looking at us and asking us questions directly, up close and personal, and they are dressed the same and share a likeness if not age, and now they are repeating those questions and the story they half-related earlier or is it another just like that story, but now it's dark and the sounds are louder...

Autobiographer, Melanie Wilson's play with sounds, explores dementia's impact on one woman, played by five actresses at different ages, through words, sounds and movement. The play disorients, not just capturing dementia's fracturing of memory (as if recalling life through a shattered mirror) but its fracturing of time, as past and present overlay each other, inseparable.

Even self is fractured as dementia reveals enough of itself to tell its host that the world isn't as it appears, but not enough to show how it actually is, leaving its host neither wholly in one world, not wholly in another.

Such disorientation provokes frustration and rage that can burn so suddenly and so brightly, then equally quickly disappear as one version of reality takes over. The five actresses as one woman show these impacts to us and we feel not just their pain, but the burden dementia places on others. 

This is a moving and deeply serious work informed by medical research and a commitment to art's power to demonstrate what can only be imagined in the most abstract terms. It will affect anyone touched by dementia's cruel stealing of loved ones, with its honesty and respect for a condition that hurts those around its host at least as much as it hurts its principal victim.

Autobiographer continues at Toynbee Studios until 5 May.