Fresh from its Summerhall run at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2016, the multi-award winning Inspector Sands bring their characteristically absurdist exploration of our twilight years to Contact, Manchester and Soho Theatre with The Lounge. Inspector Sands explore how difficult it is for all of us – young and old – to engage with the fact that we are individually, and collectively, ageing. Developed with the support of a Wellcome Trust Arts Award, and with biomedical experts specialising in the psychology and philosophy of attitudes towards ageing and mortality, the company explore what it means to be older in today’s society.
In a care home lounge somewhere off the A1, 97 year old Marsha Hewitt begins the last day of her life. But she cannot go quietly. As the radiators burn and Jeremy Kyle blares, rivalries, relatives and murderous impulses jostle for space on the Axminster carpet. By teatime, a riot is brewing.
Through witty observations and their trade-mark physical dexterity, the performers attempt to imagine their bodies in the last years of their lives aiming to encourage an open dialogue about our relationship with ageing both through the performance and ongoing engagement with a ‘Mass Observation’ style platform developed by the company. Powered by Instagram, the platform will offer an online space for the company to share audience’s video and written responses to the show and its themes. Mass_observation
Director Lu Kemp said, “The play looks at how nationally we deal with an exploding older population. Through The Lounge, Inspector Sands imagine what their own bodies might be in 60 or 70 years’ time, when they are in their late 90s or older. We are trying to find the humour and hope within disintegration: to take the audience expectation of a nursing home and invert it, to ask whether it just a place of decline or whether it can be a place of revolution.”
