SO LONG LIFE

Theatre Royal Bath

In the final stages of life, many people find that their sense of time becomes more blurred and everyone looks younger than they should. Dominic Hill's staging of Peter Nichols' new play manages to engender this same sensation in the audience. A story set in 1995 is performed in a black, white and chrome living room which incontrovertibly screams 'mid-Eighties'. Cheryl Campbell - who is 52, and looks younger - plays a sixty-year-old, with a thirty-year-old daughter (Melanie Ramsay) who looks not a day over 23. All this gives the audience a small flavour of the synaptic confusion which causes 85-year-old Alice (Stephanie Cole) - whose birthday celebrations are the focus of the play - to mentally slip up and down the timeline of her life.

In many ways So Long Life appears to be two plays juxtaposed. One is a marvellously written one-woman piece about old age: a bleaker, harsher and less inhibited Talking Head, performed with verve, beautiful comic timing and a broad Bristol accent by Ms Cole. This side of the play - which wittily and perceptively captures the sadness and anger of the declining years - sits strangely amidst a mediocre family drama about the successful middle classes, a sort of Hampstead House of Eliot for the Nineties.

Alice's descendants are all archetypal members of the chattering classes: an architect, a television presenter, a university lecturer, a social worker. Yet these characters speak like no-one on earth, conversing in bursts of eloquent didacticism and pithy little diatribes, glibly dissecting everything from Le Corbusier to the role of vox pops. It is hard to imagine that the family gatherings of even the most verbose intellectuals and media moguls are conducted as if everyone were appearing on The Late Show.

Nichols is now in his mid-seventies, and it is noticeable that the greater the gap between the age of the character and the age of the playwright, the flimsier and less real that character becomes. Alice's granddaughter Imogen (Melanie Ramsay) is purportedly a thirty-year-old university lecturer. Yet she talks more like a teenager, greeting 'old-fashioned' suggestions with an adolescent "no-one's into that sort of thing any more" and claiming that all the men she'd be interested in are up trees fighting bypasses. Meanwhile, her mother's toyboy Mark (Matthew Wait) is a chip-bearing working-class drug-addicted Belfast-scarred ex-Para: a conglomeration of hyphenated stereotypes that even EastEnders' scriptwriters would reject as too contrived.

This is, of course, if one takes the play at face value. Yet although not suggested explicitly, the fact that most of the family's artificial dialogue and characterisation takes place whilst Alice is napping - indicated by a lighting change which throws the stage into semi-darkness whenever she drops off - may imply that it is all merely the product of Alice's imagination. If this is the case, then Nichols has done an astounding job in presenting so fully an elderly person's misguided ideas of how the young (that is, anyone aged 55 or under) think and act - although he might think about making things slightly more obvious to the poor benighted audience. If it is not the case, then So Long Life is, like the curate's egg, merely excellent in parts: the old parts, when Stephanie Cole's Alice dominates the stage, showing that the elderly are not as frail or as innocent as they may appear.

TOBY O'CONNOR MORSE

To 8 September, then touring to Milton Keynes Theatre, Churchill Theatre Bromley, Malvern Theatre,
Theatre Royal Brighton, Wycombe Swan High Wycombe and Cambridge Arts Theatre