This week, Splinter has been playing at the Jack Studio Theatre. It is written by Martha Loader, who took home the Judges’ Prize at last year’s Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting for her earlier play, Bindweed.
Her new work is a tender look at the impact of early onset dementia on the relationship between Maggie and Jac.
Here, Loader uses parallel narratives to tell the story with Maggie as the connecting point between scenes that backfill her relationship with Jac (Jac 1) and those where she and Jac (Jac 2) are an established couple.
It is a well-chosen device to discreetly show us a before and after, the vibrant and daring younger Maggie brought down by a disease that seems to filter out the traits that make her who she is.
The diffident Jac 1 is the more organised and grounded of the two and organically becomes the partner who manages their day to day lives, leaving Maggie to be assuredly carefree. As Maggie starts to be “mostly normal but turned down to 80%”, it is Jac who takes on the burden of keeping their life together running as normal.
As she struggles through, Jac 2 becomes collateral damage, conscious that, as the carer, she is losing touch with the person that she used to be.
Loader employs the bookcase analogy to explain Maggie’s memory loss, and she presents its unremitting, destructive progress clearly and unsentimentally without naming it, but achieves something deeply moving.
Director Amy Wyllie paces its progress with the passing and retracing of time marked by scene changes of Becca Gibbs’s efficient, modular set design and the repeated use of Post-it note reminders.
Henri Merriam’s portrayal of Maggie is a touching one. Merriam keeps her on the right side of selfish, her breeziness and lack of self-pity making her genuinely endearing.
Her relationship with Sarah Livingstone’s sensible Jac 1 is one of chalk and cheese: lefty feminist activist and strait-laced, responsible Tory. With Caroline Rippin’s sincere Jac 2, we see her somewhat toned down and their relationship mellowed.
But everyone has their limit, and when Jac 2 needs to save what's left of herself, Rippin echoes some of that youthful clear-headedness with her sadness and frustration.
In the concluding scene, it is impossible to not feel sorrowfully for Jac. It is always harder for the one that is left behind, but Jac has been denied the clarity of widowhood. She remains married to someone who has all but gone.
There are currently nearly a million people with dementia in the UK, one in eleven amongst the over-65s. As Jac faces an uncertain future, it is difficult not to ask: what would I do?