Paradise Lodge – Tabard Theatre

Paradise Lodge continues until 24 October 2019 at the Tabard Theatre, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Paradise Lodge is a show of heartfelt and quirky content. It hinges its satire on an old people’s home ‘Paradise Lodge’ and unravels a thought provoking insight into old age. Alongside the travesty of old age in care.

It’s a show that you either warm to and slather with butter and jam, or you simply prickle with. My husband, whose father is in the early stages of dementia, found the subject matter hard to sit with.

Whereas I found the lines trickled, glided and skipped marvellously. Dementia is a topic which can all too easily bring down the shutters of discomfort. Those whose fingers are being burnt in the emotionality of dementia might struggle with Paradise Lodge, but they too might find in it a unity and release.

For it’s not easy to see any loved one crumble into a sticky mess, or watch their ‘brain become a sponge in the desert’.  But to feel there’s a community in the theatre, that’s a special strand of the play.

And this is where the bounce, humour and charming flair of the piece comes in. For Paradise Lodge is a community. It is an old people’s home where a two-man show – featuring writer Steve Cooper and Sophie Osborne – entertains an often silent and ageing crew. It’s a show about a show.

Richard Oliver’s marvellous direction means the story and songs effortlessly move along, with the audience all the time being fed titbits of aged humour and its many peccadilloes. Moments which make you giggle and squirm. You know, the humorous forgetting of things, the snappy bite back which bombs down on you like a doodlebug.

Paradise is touchingly done. Lighting shifts back and forth, golden to shadowy whispers and back again, symbolic of the 1940s entertainment Cooper and Osborne are trying to stimulate their OAP audience with. Music has long been documented as a window to remembering, and this faction is in no way lost on Cooper and Osborne.

The soft, and yet bouncy laconic sounds fill the theatre. Each vocal is dimensionally different and that’s what works so well. You can imagine the old folk listening and tapping into Cooper or Osborne as both provide different qualities of escapism.

However, it is Cooper’s capacity to provide gentle comforting fluidity to the audience that is special. His singing, his acting, his lankier disposition, reminded me very much of the late Jimmy Stewart.

Paradise Lodge is all about expression, feeling and remembering those who brought us into the world, those we love. It’s a show with a difference as it taps into something unique, ‘ageing’.

Old age is tough, and as we sit within its rapidly lengthening framework it’s so very nice to have a reminder of how old age plays out today. This play is a tribute to the older folk out there and I for one felt re-touched by its thoughtful insight and comical wand.

Laura-Jane Wareing