Take OffYour Cornflakes by Rose Henderson & Pat Nolan. The White Bear Theatre, Kennington to 12 June 2021 at 7pm. 4****. William Russell.
Harrowing, heart warming and beautifully performed by the amazing Mark Lockyer this one person but two character play is one to see. Tom is married to Trish. It is a happy marriage. He drives a London bus and they have two grown up children. He is 63 and has had to take early retirement. Lockyer plays both roles shifting from one to the other in the blink of an eye and creates two believable people, the loving but getting ever more weary Trish and the unpredictable Tom who is on a journey where things just keep getting worse as his memory fades.It is performed on a rather splendd set made of bits and pieces of cloth to create their home, a sort of patchwork of their life really, with a table and a chair for Lockyer to use. There is his love of a joke, which gets irritating, his passion for crosswords and games to defy the fading mind, the moment when he goes away for a respite break, except that the respite is really for the exhausted Trish who muses that sometime she see herself smothering him with a pillow. He starts off aware of his plight and gradually ceases to know except he knows life gets more and more irritating, she stands by getting ever more tired. Lockyer, a magnetic presence on stage, holds his audience wrapt in Michael Kingsbury's deft production.