A meditation on growing up with moments that feel kidnapped from real life.
Sam Smith’s trio of short plays, Older, is a meditation on growing up. It is unconventional, fragmented and abstract but awash with moments of beauty and tenderness.
The three plays themselves are snapshots: all duologues between friends – young children, then young adolescents, then young adults. In the first we see a petulant Telemachus stuck in the stasis of childhood as he waits for his father who he cannot grow up without. Smith gives us playful images – there are purple clouds and sandwiches with bullet holes (jam) – as Telemachus moans to his imagined friend. Alone, life is happening, and he yearns for a witness.
In the second, we see two friends emerge from a long ocean swim. They pant and as the gasps settle, one begins his usual performative musings. They cannot connect: ‘how are you feeling’ is quickly followed by ‘all you do is talk about how you’re feeling’ and a voluntary/involuntary declaration of love. Smith explores the pain of first love and, ironically, how longing for love can inhibit it.
And in the third, we see the fight for attention in lives that, as we grow older, become increasingly dense with events – pregnancies, deaths. Childhood friends reunite but the motives for their reunion are murky – self-motivated – which is hurtful. They eventually connect over shared experiences at dance school that refracted differently, and poignantly explore how the body can interrupt the ability to dance (a trans woman in a young boy’s body and a young baby in a woman’s). Tender, raw, real. Again, we feel the want for witnesses.
The characters never overlap; these are separate stories. But, thanks to Smith’s powerful writing, they pull at the same threads and thrust the audience into nostalgia that is both painful and joyful. The dialogue is quick and funny and then evocative and lyrical. There are details that show the characters have lived (‘I didn’t like your ears when we first met’, ‘I was the only boy in ballet class’), and a bravery with language (no reliance on ‘fucks’).
Older is performed by actors who create scenes that feel kidnapped from real life. Danielle James feels birthed onto the stage. There is an earnestness and rich humanity to each of their three characters; by the end I had fallen madly in love. Rachel Andrews and Anna Marks Pryce swoop into their plays with emotion and give us a masterclass in realism.
The creative hive mind that wrote and performed Older is also clearly enabled by those less visible forces: the assistant director and designer. Both feel alive and fizzy. They set Smith’s writing within a suitably abstracted landscape. Telemachus lights a match between plays, the imaginary friend has cloud earrings, the island they swim to is a jauntily sewn patchwork of fabrics that lick the audience’s feet.
I cannot suggest that everyone will like Older. Some may find the plays discordant and lacking in context (play 1), miss a conventional plot, find moments too relentlessly emotional (play 3), or wonder whether in giving us three shorter plays, Smith has side-stepped the challenge of presenting us with a full length. I, however, didn’t feel short changed. Older has indisputable conviction and whimsy. The scenes are compelling and brilliantly executed, even if you aren’t always sure where they are going.