“I love one handers,” said my theatre date as we settled into our seats for Ellie Smith’s Life on a Loop.  I love them too, and Smith’s piece reminded me that there are many different forms a good one-hander can take.

We’re used to the frenetic one-hander in this country: the one where a supremely talented actor swaps from character to character leaving us breathless from their agility. Life on a Loop takes a different approach: Smith mostly stays as one character, Joy, an older lady who tells us she’s a worker in a rest home before introducing us to her eccentric charges one by one. This old-style storytelling approach highlights Smith’s beautiful writing: it’s the small details and the lyrical descriptions that draw us in, rather than acting sleight-of-hand.

Of course, the acting is top notch as well: Smith has decades of stage and screen experience, though with her last appearance in NZ being more than 15 years ago many will not know her work (I did not before now).  She holds our attention effortlessly, setting the scene as Joy, occasionally inhabiting other characters in a monologue, but always keeping the storytelling approach where the writing does the heavy lifting.

Smith has said that her time spent singing in rest homes and hearing the stories of the residents inspired this work, and her fictional characters are drawn with a great deal of humanity and love. Hidden amongst the entertaining anecdotes about commodes and a (long) monologue about scrotal flashers is attentiveness to the pathos of the human condition. As Joy notes, she spends her days trying to find people who have lost their memories of who they were, the fate that awaits many of us.  There’s a twist in this tale; but I’m keeping mum about that.

Joy confides in us, the audience – we’re the only people who listen to her, while she spends her days listening to others. She’s had a tough life too, full of loss and rejection; but she’s far from bitter. Joy is a woman of her era: unquestioning self-sacrifice in the service of others. Speaking of eras, my theatre date (in her late 30s) doesn’t know most of the cultural references in the play: it’s a very specific zeitgeist from the 50’s and 60’s – Doris Day and other singers / actors. The audience on the night we attend does know them though: there are lots of murmurs of recognition throughout the piece, and I think Life on a Loop speaks particularly well to an older audience.

Sound design by Victor Chana is subtle: altered recordings of Doris Day’s Que Sera Sera, ‘the unofficial anthem of rest homes throughout the country’, plus a few extra voices to introduce characters or times of day in the rest home.  The set (John Parker) is simple: armchairs, distinctive cushions, a doll: these stand in for the main characters that Joy introduces us to. Tony Black’s lighting design features bright fairy lights in a tall 3-D ‘frame’ – these are a little jarring because they are either on or off and can’t be faded. The reason for having this design in addition to the more standard spots isn’t obvious, but they do enhance the feeling of Joy being confined to returning to the same room full of artifice and the same stories, day after day.

As someone with a family member living with dementia, where I feel the most engaged emotionally is when Joy references the slow decline of her husband with dementia, returning again and again to the idea where there’s no one moment to say ‘goodbye’, and therefore no closure.  Both Joy and a rest home visitor have to make the impossible choice to surrender their loved ones to care, and this is dealt with in a way that is sympathetic without sugar coating.

Life on a Loop is beautifully written, performed by its creator with love and craft, and holds meaning for audiences of all ages. Luminous and highly recommended.

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