The Startling Truths of Old World Sparrows, a play by Newcastle-based playwright Fiona Evans, is being broadcast on Sunday 10 August from 10:15 to 11PM on BBC Radio 3.
The play is based on verbatim interviews with three elderly people and is performed by children. We swoop into the lives of Rhoda, Stan and Ron as the action inter-cuts between three houses in the same street on a freezing, snowy day. When there's a power cut each person is faced with their worst fear.
The performance by children aims to explore the close links of elderly people and children; the vulnerability, simplicity, fragility and resilience.
"In juxtaposing youth and age we highlight how quickly life passes," said Evans. "How almost within the blink of an eye we go from being eight to eighty."
This will be the play's second outing. The programme won an international Silver Award for Innovation—Grand Prix Nova after its first broadcast last year.
Moira Petty in a review in The Stage described it as "an astonishing depiction of advanced age" and concludes, "I wish everyone would hear this play, but particularly the young and those in positions of authority, whose decisions so often condemn the elderly as worthless."