★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Breakout. The Mill. 24 Feb 2022
Occasionally The Fringe throws up morsels of profound humanity.
Here comes Matthew Barker to champion the strange scattered and shattered world of those living in care with dementia.
His work, The Fishbowl, performed with Evie Leonard and directed by Stephanie Daughtry, presents a series of vignettes of the often chaotic world within “the fishbowl” of a care home. He plays it all disturbingly close to the bone since he has had a day job as a carer in just such a home, working with music as a tool of connection and release for dementia sufferers. So, one could call it almost docu-theatre, since its verite is first-hand.
However, there are about twenty characters, staff and patients, thrown into the mix of this show. There is even one audience member roped in to say lines - doing so very well on the night this critic attended.
Of course, the Breakout is a very intimate space and the action of the show itself spins in a contained round in the centre. The audience is provided with a laminated page of words for Loch Lomond which Barker uses as a demonstration of the significant connecting power found between dementia sufferers and singalongs. His own voice is so powerful and beautiful that, indeed, even the shyest of audience singers is emboldened to join in.
That powerful voice is a little too strong when the play’s dialogue calls for shouting. Some consider shouting to be a weakness onstage albeit in this instance it is showing just how intolerably violently some of those hapless Alzheimers patients are treated by poorly-paid and harried carers.
Barker pulls no punches when demonstrating how roughly old people often are handled and how indifferent some staff can be to the individuals in their care. He uses assorted tools from projections on suspended sheets to a wonderful soundscape of the layers and layers of prosaic sounds which background daily life.
The depiction of a dementia patient lost in real or imagined music is both moving and enlightening. Indeed, those words encapsulate the production: moving and enlightening.
There is nothing ordinary about Barker’s play - except that it observes that which has become very ordinary in the ever-more-common world of dementia.
That’s his “fish bowl” allusion - their no-privacy enclosed world staffed by observers. It is apposite.
While Barker can no more explain the epidemic phenomenon of dementia than can the medical world, his play studies its facets and illustrates compassionate ways to communicate with those beloved lost ones.
One gathers that it is a work with future plans. In this case, it is an important work which should be powerfully supported and, perchance, soon seen by every care worker in the world.
With, perhaps, a bit more singing from Barker. And a few grammatical amendments.
He has created memorable work about not remembering.
Samela Harris
When: 24 Feb to 6 Mar
Where: The Mill
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
