Still Alice, Kings Theatre

It's been a best selling novel and a critically acclaimed film, so the storyline of Still Alice will already be well know to many.  Alice Howland, a fifty year old and very eminent professor of linguistics at Harvard, begins to realise she's forgetting things.  Not just in the usual way we all have, but in ways that make others think her behaviour odd, like forgetting someone she's met just minutes later, to panic inducing moments like being on a run and finding herself unable to remember her way home.  Over a period of four years or so we see her diagnosed with early onset alzheimer's, the steady decline of her mental faculties, and the effects of this on her family and friends.  It's a powerful story that resonates with anyone who has experience of dementia.

In the book we learn much from Alice's internal monologue, and the film uses voiceovers to achieve the same result.  But how can this be tackled in a stage version?  And how best to show the steady shrinking of Alice's world as the disease eats away at the neurons?  Christine Mary Dunford's script has taken an approach to both these problems that prove effective.  As well as the actor playing Alice we have a character called 'Herself' as an almost constant presence, playing the Alice of thoughts and emotions, the ones she doesn't, or can't, express.  And the set, at first packed full of furniture for kitchen, living room, office, cafe etc, is gradually emptied as time passes, until there's almost nothing left.

Sharon Small gives a multi faceted performance as Alice, confident, intellectual, driven at first, through confusion, fear and doubt, with a backbone of determination and rationality that fades away before our eyes.  I leave it to those more experience of the illness to pass a proper judgement, but I felt she'd done her homework well and kept alive the core of the woman in the face of her cognitive decline.

In this she's much aided by an excellent Eva Pope as Herself, a figure who circles through and around the action, voicing the unspoken, a figure of fun and hope and affection and rage who's the real core of the drama.

There's decent support from the rest of the cast as Alice's family and the doctors she consults, with nobody outstanding.  Martin Marquez as Alice's husband David is surprisingly anonymous at times.

Or perhaps it's simply a reflection of what a strong double act Small and Pope form and how moving their interactions are.  It's not a full on tearjerker, but there are plenty of moments of pathos to tug at our sympathy and empathy.

And, as with book and film, it's the latter term that is the key to enjoying this play.  Whether you find you're picturing yourself in Alice's position, or that of one of her family, making an emotional connection to the characters is essential.  This production is definitely up to the job.