You might love it... then again you might hate it

Reporter: Paul Genty
Date published: 09 March 2015


FOREVER YOUNG, Oldham Coliseum, to March 21

Well, it takes all sorts.

Some like the story, some carefully judged and witty word play, others like character comedy, still others knockabout laughs and rude jokes.

So generally speaking “Forever Young” — written 14 years ago by Swiss playwright Erik Gedeon and revived by public demand at Nottingham Playhouse three times in recent years — should please very few theatregoers.

There is no real story, the characters are caricatures, there isn’t much dialogue — so no word play — and so on. The evening is long on quirkiness, pretty short on everything else.

But then it isn’t, strictly speaking, a play; just a high-concept evening aimed at throwing lots into the pot in the name of theatre. Character development is pretty much absent and any sense of reality abandoned, which means the cast of seven can do pretty much what they want.

The evening is set on the Coliseum stage — now a home for old actors — in 2050. The late Kevin Shaw and others are pictures on the wall; Kenneth Alan Taylor’s ashes are in a jar on the piano.

Six inmates shuffle in for their night on the old stage. They sing and perform, and among the diversions are a terrible magic act, some potted Shakespeare quotations, Laurel and Hardy-style knockabout business and more, all of which runs together and all punctuated by music — lots of it, eclectically chosen and brilliantly segued, one to the next, by actor/pianist Stefan Bednarcyzk.

The cast — Bednarczyk, Coliseum favourite John Elkington as an ageing, spliff-smoking hippie, Rebecca Little a foul-mouthed Northerner, Georgina White as a doom-laden nurse, Clara Darcy as an actress of very faded gentility and Tim Frater and Dale Superville as jolly, and jolly belligerent, old actors, have middling success in portraying older actors.

There is supposed to be some kind of poignant subtext about growing old but not growing boring, but I confess I found the ultra-slow pace of the evening very boring, music notwithstanding. Gedeon wrote a one-hour diversion stretched to two and a half hours.

The main thing the evening has in its favour is indeed the music — from Elgar to Aerosmith, Simon and Garfunkel and many, many more.

The truth is that “Forever Young” is one of those all or nothing evenings. Get into it and you’ll likely laugh a lot, as some of the audience did. Don’t, and try as you might, you will fail to see the point.