Raging against the "dying of the light"

DYLAN THOMAS and W.B. Yeats could provide with ease the sub texts for Mayo Simon's gutsy two hander about the onslaught of old age in the California of the 1990s. This play literally rages against the "dying of the light" with an attractive melange of good humour, common sense - flashes of anger and despair - and a final determination to have body and soul and dance and sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.

In Brian de Salvo's production for Red Kettle much comfort may be drawn from a Jewish American resilience in the face of a bulging catalogue of the indignities of old age - weakening senses, erratic memory, disorientation, the loneliness and the ultimate humiliating invisibility of the old in an urban landscape.

Netty (Anna Manahan) and her neighbour Shprintzy (Barbara Adair) are caught in a downward spiral of eroding independence. They cling to the wreckage of their lives.

Through a touching friendship and by a merger of their remaining faculties ("Together we make a whole person") they achieve more than mere survival. It's none too easy, as Shprintzy isn't always all there. "We're two heads marching to different drummers", remarks Netty.

Barbara Adair's Shprintzy is, in turn, endearing and insufferable, but it is Anna Manahan's vibrant and emphatic performance which presents the possibility of some triumph in the face of awful mundane debility.

This is not King Lear: the series of episodes which constitute the play are uneven in quality, a trifle disjointed, not particularly innovative, but there is an assertion of human dignity which is warmly heartening. It is high on moral fibre: the young may well have something to learn from Simon's unreserved admiration of his heroine; those entering the Third or Fourth Age may take some courage from the grit and determination delineated here.