Review: Still Alice at the West Yorkshire Playhouse
Kayleigh Hinsley · March 08 2018
Still Alice was adapted by Christine Mary Dunford, from the best selling novel of the same name by Lisa Genova. It is of course well known because of the film adaptation which starred Julianne Moore, earning her an Academy Award for Best Actress. I’m aware that there are quite a few differences between the film and the play, but as I haven’t seen the film, I can’t compare them, so I’m just going to focus on the version that I saw. The West Yorkshire Playhouse production was part of their Every Third Minute festival - a festival of theatre, dementia and hope created by people living with dementia, which runs from the 9th of February until the 31st of March. There are still several events on until the end of the month, details of which can be found on the Playhouse website. The play itself ran from the 9th of February until the 3rd of March. It was 90 minutes long with no interval, so there was no break from the intensity of the story.
The story is a very moving one which focuses on the character of Alice Howland, a professor of linguistics at Harvard, who finds out that she has early onset Alzheimer’s disease. There is a horrible irony in that her life’s work has been all about communication and language and the disease causes her to lose those abilities. The play shows her dealing with the progression of the disease, and fighting to maintain her powers of communication, as well as how it affects her relationships with her family and herself.
The staging of this production was particularly clever. It began with a crowded stage, with several different sets of furniture depicting various locations. As the play progressed, the stage became emptier and emptier as the different pieces of furniture were removed until there were only two chairs left. This seemed to reflect how much Alice is forgetting and perhaps also how much less she has in her life as the play goes on; due to the disease she no longer has her job, she doesn’t see friends, and she is even beginning to forget her family and herself. The removal of furniture was a really clever and subtle way to show this.
It is a challenge to depict something like Alzheimer’s in 90 minutes - it’s a slow disease, not something that happens over night - but this was done really well. Firstly, the passage of time was aided by the use of a screen which projected the date, intermittently between scenes, starting in 2015 and leading us up to “Today”. Secondly, the play showed the slow build up of Alice’s symptoms before her diagnosis, beginning with small things that go unnoticed by the other characters such as struggling to find words. Alice then becomes disorientated on her usual run, goes to work in the middle of the night in pyjamas, and forgets how to make a pudding that she has made every year. Her family are initially reluctant to believe that there is anything wrong with her, but soon each of them recall moments where Alice has forgotten something. For her daughter, it’s that Alice called her three times and they had repeat conversations. For her son, there is a comedic moment where he brushes everything else off, except when they get to the fact that she forgot to turn the oven on. For her husband, he remembers a moment shown earlier in the play where Alice forgot she was introduced to her student’s wife; he initially thought she was drunk, but now realises that there might actually be something wrong.
Following this, Alice is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. After this point, we see her losing more and more of her memory as the disease progresses, and also beginning to struggle more and more with day to day life. For example, she becomes lost in her own house and is unable to find the bathroom. Later, Alice also begins to forget herself; there is a conversation between Alice and her consciousness where she mentions that didn’t recognise her own face in the mirror. We also see other more subtle changes, such as that the character portraying her consciousness becomes much less active during these times, and there is often more distance physically between the two of them on stage. This is reflected in the changes we see in Alice herself. At the start of the play she is very active and often goes for a run, but as the play goes on, her movements become much smaller and slower, until she is reduced to sitting in chairs with blankets wrapped around her. This really demonstrates how the disease affects someone physically, and the play highlights that is there is a lot more to Alzheimer’s disease than just memory loss. Alice experiences difficulties with orientation, following a conversation especially when lots of people are talking at the same time, and also changes in her personality; there is one scene where she becomes quite aggressive towards her son, which seems uncharacteristic. Through showing all these other elements that someone with Alzheimer’s may experience, the play gives a much fuller representation of the disease.
The main one for me was the scene where Alice is looking for support online and finds the folder titled “Butterfly” on her computer, in which she has written a letter to herself instructing herself that if she can no longer answer her set of questions about her life - such as what her address is, where her office is, and how many children she has - then she should take all the pills in a bottle at the back of her drawer and go to sleep. She nearly does this without even questioning it, as she trusts her former self’s judgement, but thankfully she is interrupted by her husband who tells her that she’s been asked to give a speech. In that, we see a contrast between what she thought she would want, and how she feels now. Previously, she didn’t want to live if she was “no longer of sound mind”, as she put it, but now we see that she wants to set up a support group for people with the disease as there only seem to be ones for caregivers. This sends a message of hope - that you can still have a purpose and that the diagnosis shouldn’t be the end of your life; you can still find some happiness in the time after that - as well as highlighting the real need for effective support groups. The speech that Alice then makes is given facing the audience, almost breaking the fourth wall but not quite, and emphasises this message of hope. Even at the end of the play, Alice and her husband are at their cottage, and she’s not quite sure where she is, or who her husband is, or even who she is, although she does remember a little bit when he shows her the book they wrote together, but she realises that she’s happy there and wants to stay.
In summary, Still Alice is a play with a sad story; one that shows you the harsh reality of early onset Alzheimer’s and the impact it has on a person’s life. This is amplified by the fact that Alice is young, and an incredibly successful woman, a professional at the top of her game, and she has so much of her life taken away from her by the disease. Of course the story doesn’t have a happy ending, but I would say that the play does have a hopeful ending, at the point where we leave Alice. Even though we know that it’s only going to get worse for her, I think it really speaks to not forgetting those little moments of happiness and hope.
Overall, I really enjoyed the play as an experience; being made to feel something then and there, by people who are actually there. The play takes you through a range of emotions experienced by Alice - confusion, panic, sadness and frustration - but it is not without comedy and not without hope. Sharon Small was incredible as Alice; she gave a fantastic performance and was really authentic. It’s something I’m never going to forget; it was play that really meant something and was important, so I’m really glad that this was the first professional production of a play that I got to see.
Last Saturday, I went to I see the West Yorkshire Playhouse production of Still Alice. I had heard about it in The Gryphon, our university newspaper, and saw that Sharon Small was playing Alice. I had watched her in the BBC medical drama Trust Me over the summer, which starred Jodie Whittaker as a nurse who pretended to be a doctor. Small’s character in Trust Me, a senior doctor, was funny, smart and sassy, but also struggled with alcoholism. Small gave a brilliantly layered performance in the drama, so I knew she would be similarly amazing as Alice Howland.
Still Alice was adapted by Christine Mary Dunford, from the best selling novel of the same name by Lisa Genova. It is of course well known because of the film adaptation which starred Julianne Moore, earning her an Academy Award for Best Actress. I’m aware that there are quite a few differences between the film and the play, but as I haven’t seen the film, I can’t compare them, so I’m just going to focus on the version that I saw. The West Yorkshire Playhouse production was part of their Every Third Minute festival - a festival of theatre, dementia and hope created by people living with dementia, which runs from the 9th of February until the 31st of March. There are still several events on until the end of the month, details of which can be found on the Playhouse website. The play itself ran from the 9th of February until the 3rd of March. It was 90 minutes long with no interval, so there was no break from the intensity of the story.
The story is a very moving one which focuses on the character of Alice Howland, a professor of linguistics at Harvard, who finds out that she has early onset Alzheimer’s disease. There is a horrible irony in that her life’s work has been all about communication and language and the disease causes her to lose those abilities. The play shows her dealing with the progression of the disease, and fighting to maintain her powers of communication, as well as how it affects her relationships with her family and herself.
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| Sharon Small and Andrew Rothney. Photo by Geraint Lewis. |
One thing I found both interesting and useful is that in the play there is another character on stage with Alice; this character is Alice’s inner voice, or consciousness, and this allows us to see what’s going on inside her head. The conversations that Alice has with her consciousness, both while alone and during her interactions with others, reveal to the audience what she’s thinking about, and later demonstrate that Alice is picking up on a lot more of what is going on than she is able to express verbally to her family. This is suggestive of a lot more cognition than popular representations of dementia or Alzheimer’s might lead us to believe, and is something that wasn’t included in the film, but is reflective of the book and works really well on stage.
The staging of this production was particularly clever. It began with a crowded stage, with several different sets of furniture depicting various locations. As the play progressed, the stage became emptier and emptier as the different pieces of furniture were removed until there were only two chairs left. This seemed to reflect how much Alice is forgetting and perhaps also how much less she has in her life as the play goes on; due to the disease she no longer has her job, she doesn’t see friends, and she is even beginning to forget her family and herself. The removal of furniture was a really clever and subtle way to show this.
It is a challenge to depict something like Alzheimer’s in 90 minutes - it’s a slow disease, not something that happens over night - but this was done really well. Firstly, the passage of time was aided by the use of a screen which projected the date, intermittently between scenes, starting in 2015 and leading us up to “Today”. Secondly, the play showed the slow build up of Alice’s symptoms before her diagnosis, beginning with small things that go unnoticed by the other characters such as struggling to find words. Alice then becomes disorientated on her usual run, goes to work in the middle of the night in pyjamas, and forgets how to make a pudding that she has made every year. Her family are initially reluctant to believe that there is anything wrong with her, but soon each of them recall moments where Alice has forgotten something. For her daughter, it’s that Alice called her three times and they had repeat conversations. For her son, there is a comedic moment where he brushes everything else off, except when they get to the fact that she forgot to turn the oven on. For her husband, he remembers a moment shown earlier in the play where Alice forgot she was introduced to her student’s wife; he initially thought she was drunk, but now realises that there might actually be something wrong.
Following this, Alice is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. After this point, we see her losing more and more of her memory as the disease progresses, and also beginning to struggle more and more with day to day life. For example, she becomes lost in her own house and is unable to find the bathroom. Later, Alice also begins to forget herself; there is a conversation between Alice and her consciousness where she mentions that didn’t recognise her own face in the mirror. We also see other more subtle changes, such as that the character portraying her consciousness becomes much less active during these times, and there is often more distance physically between the two of them on stage. This is reflected in the changes we see in Alice herself. At the start of the play she is very active and often goes for a run, but as the play goes on, her movements become much smaller and slower, until she is reduced to sitting in chairs with blankets wrapped around her. This really demonstrates how the disease affects someone physically, and the play highlights that is there is a lot more to Alzheimer’s disease than just memory loss. Alice experiences difficulties with orientation, following a conversation especially when lots of people are talking at the same time, and also changes in her personality; there is one scene where she becomes quite aggressive towards her son, which seems uncharacteristic. Through showing all these other elements that someone with Alzheimer’s may experience, the play gives a much fuller representation of the disease.
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| Ruth Gemmell and Sharon Small. Photo by Geraint Lewis |
There are several very moving scenes in the play that stood out for me. In one such scene, Alice is thinking about what she wants to do before she dies. She muses that she wishes she had cancer, because at least she would have something she could fight, and even if she lost that fight, she would be able to look the people she loved in the eyes and say goodbye, knowing who they were, highlighting the devastating reality of Alzheimer’s. This tragic moment is lifted slightly by a little comedy (“you’re ruining my ice cream”), and is followed by Alice’s realisation that the things that are important to her are all related to family rather than work. Even though she loves her work, the things that she really wants are to see her daughter in a play and to hold her son’s baby. Eventually, these things do start to happen, but by the time they do, they don’t really register with her, which was sad to watch. Another particularly moving moment is the scene where Alice forgets that her mother and sister have died and experiences the same grief all over again when it is mentioned, as if it’s the first time, even though we know it happened years ago when she was in college.
The main one for me was the scene where Alice is looking for support online and finds the folder titled “Butterfly” on her computer, in which she has written a letter to herself instructing herself that if she can no longer answer her set of questions about her life - such as what her address is, where her office is, and how many children she has - then she should take all the pills in a bottle at the back of her drawer and go to sleep. She nearly does this without even questioning it, as she trusts her former self’s judgement, but thankfully she is interrupted by her husband who tells her that she’s been asked to give a speech. In that, we see a contrast between what she thought she would want, and how she feels now. Previously, she didn’t want to live if she was “no longer of sound mind”, as she put it, but now we see that she wants to set up a support group for people with the disease as there only seem to be ones for caregivers. This sends a message of hope - that you can still have a purpose and that the diagnosis shouldn’t be the end of your life; you can still find some happiness in the time after that - as well as highlighting the real need for effective support groups. The speech that Alice then makes is given facing the audience, almost breaking the fourth wall but not quite, and emphasises this message of hope. Even at the end of the play, Alice and her husband are at their cottage, and she’s not quite sure where she is, or who her husband is, or even who she is, although she does remember a little bit when he shows her the book they wrote together, but she realises that she’s happy there and wants to stay.
In summary, Still Alice is a play with a sad story; one that shows you the harsh reality of early onset Alzheimer’s and the impact it has on a person’s life. This is amplified by the fact that Alice is young, and an incredibly successful woman, a professional at the top of her game, and she has so much of her life taken away from her by the disease. Of course the story doesn’t have a happy ending, but I would say that the play does have a hopeful ending, at the point where we leave Alice. Even though we know that it’s only going to get worse for her, I think it really speaks to not forgetting those little moments of happiness and hope.
Overall, I really enjoyed the play as an experience; being made to feel something then and there, by people who are actually there. The play takes you through a range of emotions experienced by Alice - confusion, panic, sadness and frustration - but it is not without comedy and not without hope. Sharon Small was incredible as Alice; she gave a fantastic performance and was really authentic. It’s something I’m never going to forget; it was play that really meant something and was important, so I’m really glad that this was the first professional production of a play that I got to see.
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