Character assassination

Here are three truths about play-writing. A script without an interval will be structurally flawed. A vague, whimsical title means a vague, whimsical drama. And a play about Alzheimer’s will self-destruct for the obvious reason that drama is an examination of character while Alzheimer’s is an effacement of character, so the paint evaporates before it reaches the canvas. A fourth truth is that subsidised theatres know nothing of the first three. So that explains Plaques and Tangles at the Royal Court, which runs for 110 uninterrupted minutes, without the variations of mood generated by an interval, and which examines a case of early-onset dementia.

Megan is a married librarian with two kids. We watch her develop from the age of 22 to about 45 when her mind starts to go wibbly-wobbly. Playwright Nicola Wilson works hard to make Megan eccentric and attractive. She’s smart, sensuous, irascible, impulsive, well-educated and fascinated by words. But she doesn’t wear her erudition lightly. It wears her heavily. She discusses abstruse etymologies and the origins of proverbs. She quotes Gabriel García Márquez and early imprints of the New Oxford American Dictionary. To emphasise her lingual facility she regularly leaks into German without warrant, or translation. There’s no room for fun in this portrait because, I imagine, the writer’s aim is to put a ‘powerful intelligent matriarch’ on stage.

Wilson seems to realise that once Megan departs, the play goes with her so she postpones the valediction by flipping back into Megan’s early history and by accessorising the script with expressionist platitudes. There are ghost scenes and dream sequences. There’s a lecture-y bit, for schools perhaps, explaining the biochemistry of dementia. And we enjoy a Luis Buñuel moment where the actors become automatons and move jerkily backwards pretending to be stuck in a rewinding film.