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by Joan MacLeod, directed by Richard Rose

Tarragon Theatre/Alberta Theatre Projects, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

March 18-April 19, 2009

A while ago a rest home in Toronto used the advertising slogan, “The last move you’ll ever have to make,” seemingly unaware of its lugubrious implications.  Joan MacLeod’s latest play, Another Home Invasion, now having its Toronto premiere at the Tarragon Theatre, focusses on that final move.  As a social issues play it simmers with anger that how the elderly spend the end of their lives is determined by the health care bureaucracy rather than by the elderly themselves.  Given its form as a 75-minute one-woman play, it works best, however, as an insightful character study of the ageing woman Jean, played by Nicola Lipman, for whom the role was written.

Though in her late 70s or early 80s, Jean is still bright and tries to stay fit.  She has lived in the same house in North Vancouver with her husband for more than fifty years, but now her husband Alec is becoming increasing debilitated because of a stroke and is starting to show signs of dementia.  The long-suffering housewife has now become her husband’s care-giver.  Jean has put her name on a list to enter a retirement home that allows couples to live together, but, as she discovers, others will choose what finally happens.  In an odd twist, MacLeod displaces Jean’s vague fear of her future with her concrete fear of a young drug addict who approaches her front door with the likely intent of invasion and robbery that he does not carry out.  A playwright more trusting of her audience would allow us to decide how the drug addict fits into the plot, but MacLeod can’t resist spelling out for us that bureaucratic meddling is as much a “home invasion” as what the addict was contemplating.  

The pile of fallen leaves around Jean’s chair is too obviously symbolic and the menacing shadow of the addict and all the sound effects distracting and unnecessary.  Lipman’s immaculate performance sums everything up in itself.  This is not the horrid cliché of the feisty senior, but a complex portrait of a woman who will fight tenaciously for the few things she can control because they have become so outnumbered by what she cannot control.  Frustration and love battle within her as she tries to see in her husband what he was instead of what has become.  Lipman captures all of Jean’s intricate mixture of humour, grit, fear and resignation.  Her understated, completely natural performance is one to treasure.                  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-03-23.

Photo: Nicola Lipman. ©Trudie Lee.