Preview: The Luxurious Time
Swan Theatre, Worcester – Friday 16 October – 7.45pm
Tickets: £15 / £12 concession (transaction fee applies)
Advance tickets available via the Box office: 01905 611427 or via the Worcester Theatres website.
When dementia strikes, can love survive?
That is the deceptively simple question at the heart of The Luxurious Time, a new play coming to Worcester’s Swan Theatre – a deeply personal story about love, ageing, memory and the difficult choices that can come when the person you love begins to disappear.
Written and performed by Martin Lewton, the play is based on his own experience as his partner succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease. Lewton began making notes while his partner was still living at home, little knowing that those observations would eventually become a play – and a tribute to the man he loved.
There is plenty of darkness in the story, but The Luxurious Time isn’t simply an evening of misery. It is also described as occasionally very funny, frequently poetic and ultimately concerned with some pretty universal questions about what it means to grow old, to care for someone and to confront our own mortality.
“Now is the luxurious time when we can grow old.”
Lewton has written and performed more than 40 plays, many exploring queer lives and identities, including Lord Arthur’s Bed, Naked Homo, Billy Budd Sailor, Handel’s Cross, Mirando the Gay Tempest and Queer Bodies. His latest book, Out On Stage – How to Make Queer Theatre, was published earlier this year.
He is joined here by director Nathan Crossan-Smith, whose credits include work with Liverpool Everyman, Orange Tree, Audible, LAMDA, the National Theatre, Graeae and Southbank Centre.
The play opened at London’s Omnibus Theatre in June before embarking on its UK tour, presented by Theatre North, the award-winning company which has spent two decades creating and touring groundbreaking queer theatre.
But beneath the label of ‘queer theatre’ is a story that reaches far beyond any particular community. Dementia, love, loss, care and the questions of Where are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? are things that ultimately belong to all of us.
A poignant – and potentially surprisingly funny – evening of theatre about holding on when memory begins to let go.