For Once I Was

Three colourful doors. Behind each, a different time zone: past, present, future. And all three lead into the same space: the stage. Time is folding in on itself in Jon Cooper’s new play For Once I Was at the Tristan Bates Theatre.

The reason for this phenomenon lies in the play’s main theme. Its protagonist Jacob (Edmund Dehn) is suffering from Alzheimers, and the performance charts his decline. We witness the first stages of the illness when Jacob is still trying to hold on to his energetic life and his successful career as a head-hunter. Once this turns out to be impossible, he decides to capture his remaining memories on a tape-recorder. The play ends with his daughter Gracie (Rebecca Stevenson) and her ex-boyfriend Michael (Jim Fish) taking him on a tour of his own past based on his recorded memories. In the course of this development, Gracie manages to rekindle her relationship with her father, and also comes closer to Michael, the only person to help her through difficult times.

Cooper cleverly represents the collapse of past and present in Jacob’s mind through a fragmented chronology. With the use of two blackboards, on which the different moments in time are indicated, and the tape-recorder from which key memories are replayed, we see a poignant juxtaposition of these two time frames. Director Steve Harper enforces this mirroring effect by running many of these incidents in parallel. Harper is able to elude the duplication of storyline by exploring differences in tone and rhythm between the narration and the action: a memory that causes pain for Gracie and Michael for example, could have been a joyful experience for Jacob.

Through all of these changes of time and emotion, it is the actors’ versatility and subtlety that makes this performance special. Story and structure are well-conceived, but without Rebecca Stevenson’s ability to change from schoolgirl Gracie to a prematurely grown-up woman in a heartbeat, and Edmund Dehn’s harrowing juxtaposition of energetic businessman and a dumb, pitiable wreck of a man, the play would remain just that – an interesting story well told. Harper rightly identified Cooper’s ability to create nuanced characters as the strongest point of For Once I Was, and found actors that live up to the demands. Even characters that could have been seen as minor, such as Jacob’s girlfriend Eleanor, or Gracie’s ex-boyfriend Michael, are given depth by Victoria Kruger and Jim Fish. Strong as the main pull of empathy towards Jacob and his plight is, I never stopped thinking about the feelings of the people around him.

Consequently, plot was secondary, while relationships and reactions took centre-stage – a simple smile, the turning away of a face. I was surprised to see Annabel Pemberton’s Laura (Jacob’s wife) in the spotlight given her relatively small part. She infused every gesture with a special significance, but due to the intimacy of the play this came across as rather heavy-handed. It raises the question as to whether the script would not be more suited to the medium of film; particularly in its ability for close-ups, match cuts, and cross-fades. Even the dissolving of time, the bleeding of one character into another (Jacob increasingly confuses his girlfriend Eleanor with his ex-wife Laura), would be more effective on screen. Despite this minor imbalance, the fact remains that the performance sucked me into a bitter-sweet world of emotional conflict and confusion.