Missing the Bus to David Jones
It's worth facing ageing and death when visiting the surreal nursing home of Theatre Kantanka.
Overview
You've seen many a fresh, edgy theatre troupe present group-devised reflections on the insights wrangled from their recently shed adolescence. What you see less of are fresh, edgy theatre troupes reflecting on old age. We rarely get the chance to report back and make art about it once we're on the other side, and in the meantime, we prefer not to have to think about it. But given as the clinical announcer reminds us at the start of the show "our life is a gradual death", it may bear thinking about where we're headed, what gives meaning and dignity to the twilight years and what kind of treatment we want when we, or the people we love, get there, and Theatre Kantanka are the ones with whom you want to visit these ponderings' hotbed, the nursing home.
Director Carlos Gomes and the ensemble have built Missing the Bus to David Jones out of extensive observation at aged care facilities and interviews with the residents, visitors and staff. The resulting vignettes unfold in bursts of achingly real dialogue and internal monologue, precisely executed physicality (from immobility to dancing to Parkinson's), evocative video projections, sound and symbols.
On sparsely furnished lino leading to swinging doors and a wavering projection of what can only be the great beyond, the elderly characters play bingo, make a ballet of their walkers and dress in hats and hound's-tooth for a bus to David Jones and an excursion to the high life that isn't coming. "Where is my beautiful mother?" a man pleads at an incognisant woman. The things they do with nanna blankets will stir your soul.
There's no narrative, but this is a remarkably thoughtful and cohesive patchwork. It's unavoidably sad, but empathetic humour; the traces of rich, past lives in fated elderly mannerisms; and the unexpected emergence of new motivations and, sometimes, pleasures is enough to offer respite to the young and honour to the ageing. It's a moving journey worth taking.
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