Dementia Street

Smug Roberts
North West Theatre Arts Company

Dementia Street (SICK! Festival)

The 2024 SICK! Festival has been created with residents and organisations of Moston, Harpurhey and Charlestown and moved out of Manchester city centre to venues in those areas. The North West Theatre Arts Company is a welcoming venue with impeccably polite staff, a decent stage and lighting rig and tiered seating offering good sightlines. Getting there by bus is like trying to organise Brexit, but can’t have everything.

The subject matter of comedian Smug Roberts’s Dementia Street sounds potentially harrowing; tracing the deterioration of his mother’s mental health as she moves through the seven stages of dementia. Possibly Roberts feels uncomfortable at tackling such emotionally tough material or worries his fanbase might not accept the concept, but Dementia Street is closer to a basic stand-up routine than a cathartic theatrical monologue.

There is little factual information in the show. It is structured around voiceovers counting down and specifying the nature of each stage of dementia, but no details are given of how the family reacted to the initial diagnosis or the practical arrangements which were made other than that Roberts’s profession allows plenty of time to make visits.

Writing a comedy about dementia would be daring, and Roberts is careful to stay well within the bounds of good taste. Each of the stages of dementia is illustrated by Roberts interacting with an audience member as if they are his mother. The examples are, however, not particularly disturbing—leaving the beans on the stove to burn or forgetting a dental appointment. The only real joke is Roberts’s mother taking an irreverent approach to a questionnaire intended to assess her condition.

Likewise, any poignancy is limited. There is an emotional description of what happened when, in a late stage of her dementia, Roberts was unexpectedly recognised by his mother, but generally emotions are kept on a low boil. It is doubtful any audience member who has cared for someone with a long-term illness will be shocked when Roberts guiltily admits to mixed emotions about his mother.

After briefly discussing each stage of the illness, Roberts leaves the subject of dementia, steps into his stand-up comedian persona and performs extracts from his act. Roberts’s routines are heavily autobiographical and so feature family members, which provides a vague link to the topic of his mother, but it is hard to avoid the feeling Roberts is recycling material from his standard act.

Comedians often remark an easy way of getting a laugh is to perform material which is ‘blue’ or ‘local’. Roberts goes for the latter; he was born in the area where the venue is sited, and the audience is full of residents, so his shamelessly parochial and nostalgic material gets a very warm reception. However, as the stand-up routine takes up more than half the running time of the play, the balance between the jokes and the traumatic subject of dementia seems out of synch.

Dementia Street feels like a work in progress which has not yet gone as far as one might hope in exploring a sensitive topic in the necessary depth.

Reviewer: David Cunningham

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