23/10/2015
Reflection on winter years is rich and nourishing
The Herald 23 Oct 2015
DONNA RUTHERFORD: Serves up a feast for theatre-goers.
Theatre Broth Tron, Glasgow Mary Brennan **** Carrots – don’t forget the carrots! In they go, and Liz’s Lentil Soup simmers under our noses because Donna Rutherford is serving up Broth, her wistfully tender reflection on life in old age. Alongside real-time soup making, Rutherford deftly balances video interviews of vividly forthright pensioners with her own mid-life thoughts on what the passage of time does to us, not just in body and mind but in our changing priorities and perspectives. It’s a bitter-sweet Broth, rich in welljudged flavours.
Why soup? Well, whatever age we are, home-made soup is never just a comfort food, it’s an ‘open sesame’ to memories that nourish our sense of self, and connect us to the heartland of family past and present. The on-screen elders openly share such personal recollections while ruefully, drolly, admitting to the frustrations of encroaching limitations: poorer hearing, eyesight, mobility, and short-term memory seem to make the wider world shrink – but only if you let it, and all six emerge as role models in terms of coping with loss (of partners, as well as faculties) and relishing the time still ahead of them.
If Rutherford’s interviewing skills allow individuals to voice the “then and now” of their lives, her own monologues deliver perceptive, poetic comments on how society also changes as time goes by – the vignette on the potent qualities of handwritten letters is pithy, yet poignant: her wry “emotions, not emoticons” summed up a signal difference between mail and e-mail.
Inge Thomson’s soundscore tellingly referenced the interplay between music and memory, K Yvonne Strain helped with the cooking (as well as providing the BSL interpretation) and Rutherford, as is her wont, touched on issues of ageing with honesty and humanity. Tasty soup, too!
