Notes on Falling Leaves ( Archived )

Reviews

Pictured: Pam Ferris and Ralf Little

Photography by Alastair Muir

“wonderful, Beckettian evocation of a mind struggling to comprehend the loss of its own faculties and the running down of the self.”

Nicholas DeJongh EVENING STANDARD

Friday 13 February 2004

“Ayub Khan Din’s deeply moving new play lasts only 50 minutes, but it conjures up a world of loss, love and grief. At times the writing is as spare as Samuel Beckett’s, but there is also a warmth, and a vivid eye for detail, that make the piece overwhelming in its emotional impact.

The dramatist is best known for East is East, later turned into a highly successful British film, based on his experience growing up in a working-class Anglo-Pakistani family in Salford. It was a delightfully funny, touching and rambunctious piece.

It’s sometimes said that comedies are merely tragedies interrupted before they reach their conclusion, and so it proves here. Once again drawing on personal experience, Khan Din depicts his mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease, and the whole play has the harrowing smack of lived experience. The dramatist’s own mother was diagnosed when she was 51, and died three years later.

The characters, called simply Man and Woman, occupy a stage covered in fallen leaves, with a single park bench. The son has come to visit his mother in her care home, and has spent the previous night in the old family house before it is cleared by the council and offered to another family.

For most of the play the son does all the talking. Initially, his tone is almost brutal, as he describes taking a new girlfriend to the former family home the previous night and deflowering her. But his repeated nervous coughs and throat-clearings suggest a man desperately ill at ease, and though he knows his mother can’t understand a word he’s saying, talking to her helps him, he says, “in some odd, f***ed-up kind of way”.

There are astonishing moments in this monologue, delivered with rapt intensity by Ralf Little. His memory of the time when his mother was first diagnosed and a panicky lump rose to his throat, the recent experience of smelling one of her old coats and feeling “I was next to you again, the old you.”

But then he imagines what’s going on now amid the “black, rotten, putrid sludge” of his mother’s brain, and, startlingly, she begins to speak. It is of course the son’s projection of what his mute mother might be experiencing. But thanks to the imaginative empathy of Khan Din’s writing, and the truth and detail of Pam Ferris’s remarkable performance, the effect is to give a distressingly vivid impression of what it might be like to inhabit the head of an Alzheimer’s victim.

“I just want me again for a momentness” declares the mother, heart-rendingly, as she describes the panic of her diagnosis, the humiliation of messing herself in front of others, the huge distance she now feels from her son and the rest of the world.

In Marianne Elliot’s hypnotic production, the quality of the writing is matched by the emotional candour of the acting, in a play that beautifully captures the pain of love between mother and son, and what Larkin described as “the whole hideous inverted childhood” of senility.

Charlies Spencer DAILY TELEGRAPH

16 February 2004

“beautiful we hang on every word.”

Alastair Macaulay FINANCIAL TIMES3 stars 16 February 2004

“a compelling piece of theatre the performances of Ralf Little and Pam Ferris seem effortless. Both are mesmerising I feel lucky to have seen it.”

Daisy Garnett SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

14 February 2004