Harry McDonald’s adaptation of Ali Smith’s novel Autumn about the decades-long friendship of Elizabeth with her neighbour Daniel is not an easy story to follow.
It’s not just the way scenes flit constantly between the decades, between real events and dream sequences. It’s also the curiously dense conversations about the relationship of stories to pictures and pictures to the world. These discussions have a literary flourish more typical of books than real-world conversations.
The play can feel like lots of pieces from a jigsaw puzzle that we are somehow trying to piece together, without having access to any overall picture to guide us.
The gentle, positive story is told from the point of view of Elizabeth Demand (Rebecca Banatvala), who by the end of the show is in her early thirties visiting a care home reading books by Dickens and others to her former neighbour Daniel Gluck aged 101, who in her childhood (perhaps aged nine and older) was the “unofficial” babysitter when her mum went out shopping and became her good friend.
The show begins with those early encounters when he would talk with her about works of art in the garden, saying, “every picture tells a story,” and, “whoever makes up a story, makes up a world.” Sometimes, they would talk about Pauline Boty, one of the key founders of the British pop-art movement.
He would arrange film shows in the garden and take her to see a play about “colonialism”, which turns out to be Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Those conversations helped shape her life, as she later became an art teacher and made a special study of the pop artist Pauline Boty.
All this takes place against a bleak backdrop of Brexit, the closure of public buildings and reports of attacks on refugees. Elizabeth’s mum (Sophie Ward) says she is “tired of the new violence that is here and on its way.” Fences are going up around common land prompting her mum to throw her drink container at the fence. Daniel mentions that “someone killed an MP.”
A fine cast gives an impressive performance, with Nancy Crane taking on multiple roles. Gary Lilburn is riveting as Daniel.
Drop into any few minutes of the show and you will be warmed and engaged by the characters and what they say. But the problem is the puzzling connection between the swiftly moving scenes and the different periods, events and conversations that make it a difficult story to follow.