Brighton Fringe 2025
Slipping Through My Fingers
Beware My Sting
Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Fringe Theatre, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: The Lantern Theatre 77 St James's St. Brighton BN2 1PA
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
My brother is a documentary historian, specialising in the paperwork – letters, forms, invoices and the like – that have always been part of life in literate societies.
He once gave a talk where he said that, often, the only evidence of a person’s life could be found in just three documents. A birth certificate. A marriage certificate. A death certificate.
Sometimes, a researcher or historian would have to try to recreate the path of a life – an entire life from beginning to end – from those three small slips of paper.
Review
‘Slipping Through My Fingers’ begins at the end. Maggie’s prostrate in a hospital bed: old and clearly very ill, and her daughter Lou is dozing in a chair next to her. Lou tries to perk the old woman up by talking about her daughter – Maggie’s granddaughter.
“Yes, Mum – Amelia’s getting married”. But not to a man, it seems.
So there you have it – three generations of a family, set out for the Lantern audience with wonderful economy of language, in Alex Louise’s evocative writing. She directed the production, too – with the wonderful results you’ll read about below. Unforgettable.
The dimly lit set – bluish illumination on the bed and the chair – seemed to promise a rather sad portrayal of the old lady’s final hours … but then the lights went to black; and when they came back on the old Maggie was transformed into a much younger Maggie, sitting up now in bed, and cradling her baby in her arms. Trying to think of a name for her new-born. Louise, perhaps? Lou, anyway. She’ll be Lou, then.
Wow ! What a jump. From the end of someone’s life, to somewhere near the middle. But the transformation was done so believably and seamlessly that we went along with it. That’s the beauty of theatre as a medium for telling stories – set up the cues effectively, and the audience will follow.
And then it happened again … the lights went to black, and when they relit this time the bed had been pushed back against the wall. Now we’re in some kind of care home, and a middle-aged Lou is trying to work out what’s happened to Maggie’s clothes. Maggie’s much older now, though not bed-ridden yet, but she’s rather dishevelled, and very aggressive towards whoever’s stolen her things, and towards the Home in general. Eventually Lou finds the garments, hidden (of course) under Maggie’s mattress.
Because Maggie’s losing more than just her clothes – she’s in this care home because she’s suffering from some form of dementia. It’s affecting her memory, but there’s other stuff, too – Maggie’s always had a fairly confrontational personality, but her condition has eroded any personality restraints, and now she can be downright nasty …
Another sudden lighting transformation. Now she’s much younger again, and Lou is just a four-year-old, preparing for a Halloween party. Maggie’s trying in vain to get the child into a party dress, or even a vampire cape – but the child’s insisting, absolutely demanding – that she wears her Bumble Bee costume. A lot of the magic of this production was that all three actresses could transform their voice and body-language to become different ages. In this scene, Sarah Widdas plays the petulant child as believably as she played the adult Lou in the scene before.
And what of Maggie’s granddaughter Amelia? We first meet her aged thirteen, and it’s Mothers’ Day. Lou’s taken her to give presents to her grandmother – but Maggie’s losing it: doesn’t know why there are gifts, and doesn’t want the ‘bloody presents’ anyway. An awkward situation, and we see Amelia’s talents as a peacemaker for the first time, jollying the older women along and finding ways to defuse the tension.
Another jump – and this time Lou herself is thirteen. Maggie’s angry because the girl has lost her new – and expensive – trainers. The mother’s trying to get the daughter out of the house on time, to get to school. Clever writing. The same situations recur. Lou gets blamed for losing things, but then later on, Maggie herself increasingly mislays stuff: objects as well as names ….
Then we jump again, and Maggie’s old, and in a Home, and it’s Christmas and Lou and Amelia have taken her presents. But the old woman isn’t responsive, and so the younger women end up talking between themselves – talking over her, in fact. Finally Maggie just wants to get back to her room …
Jump, after jump, after jump. A bit like looking through an old-fashioned photo album – here’s someone as a baby, and then a couple of pages on, she’s leaving to go to university. Then there she is in a wedding dress – and a few pages more and she’s holding her own child.
Maybe a lot of the value in albums is that they act as memory triggers. We forget events, and certainly the details of someone’s appearance, and the photos help bring them back. The older Maggie has increasing difficulty remembering who’s who. The pivotal moment in fact comes at the very end of the play, when Lou mentions Amelia’s partner, Sam.
Who’s Sam? Maggie asks. Her daughter at first thinks her mother’s joking, but then she realises that the older woman has suffered a memory loss. Maggie covers up the slip (haven’t we all seen people do that) but as we the audience are outside the timeline, we know that this is just the first indication of an irreversible decline. A few years later than this event, Maggie was hospitalised in a psychiatric ward after forgetting the kitchen stove and causing a house fire.
Like a photo album, as I said. But the three actresses brought the subjects vividly to life, carrying out quick costume changes – different tops or jackets – to give themselves different ages. Body language and accent, too. Jules Craig played Maggie with a broad Glaswegian accent. She’s always got an eye for a bargain, and she can spot when someone’s trying to pull the wool over her eyes – “Do you think I came up the Clyde on a banana boat?”
Sarah Widdas, as Lou, had to transform herself over successive scenes, back and forth from a four-year-old to a middle aged woman with a daughter of her own. More – she’s effectively become the parent of her own mother, as Maggie’s become increasingly frail. All Widdas did was a minimum of costume change, and I completely believed I was watching the person age.
It brought to mind Harry Belafonte’s song ‘Turn Around’ – which, thinking again of photo albums, was actually used in an 1980’s commercial for Kodak, for that very reason.
‘Where are you going, my little one, little one,
Where are you going, my baby, my own?
Turn around and you’re two
Turn around and you’re four
Turn around and you’re a young girl going out of my door.’
Seerché Deveraux, too, had to age in stages, as she developed from the rather precocious teenage peacemaker Amelia, to the twenty-year-old flying off to university. At one point she had to watch sadly as her grandmother expressed the hopelessness of her situation – “I’ve lost my friends. I’ve lost my home. I’ve lost my independence”. I could hear a couple of audience members snuffling, close to me, and I’m sure there were more.
Because this is a play about dementia, and the performance was also a fundraiser for Alzheimer’s Research UK. So many of us know someone who’s affected – either as a sufferer, or as a relative or carer.
As the Rolling Stones put it, all those years ago –
‘What a drag it is, getting old.’
