Tragic personal experience of Alzheimer’s inspires play

Simon is renewing his friendship with the town’s Drip Action theatre company who will be presenting the piece.

CHALK runs for three nights (Thursday to Saturday, February 24-26) at the Victoria Institute in Arundel (https://www.thevictoriainstitute.com/event/chalk/).

The show will be a fundraiser for the Alzheimer’s Society.

Simon, a writer/performer originally from East Preston but now based in Nottingham, first staged the show in Nottinghamshire in June with the Robin Hood Theatre Company.

Now he is taking it back to what he calls The Motherland – Sussex, where his mother still lives. He is hoping one day to be able to tour it.

“Sadly I lost a couple of family members to Alzheimer’s a few years ago. I lost my grandmother Edith about a decade or so ago and more recently my uncle Alan through a different form of dementia.

“I remember these two people and they were just written all over large parts of my childhood and I just have such fond and special memories of them.

“We saw them become ill and have to live with this pretty dreadful illness.

“I just remember visiting them and seeing how cruel it was. For most of their lives they were these glorious people from my childhood and now they were not able to really recognise us or remember their experiences until they had these moments where they would just light up, usually triggered by something like music or a memory or a conversation. There were moments of total recall and they would be themselves again.

“But they would drift in and drift out and drift in and drift out as they deteriorated and these moments of clarity got fewer and further in between. Medicine is coming on and there are better treatments and it is something that can be slowed down now but there is no real cure.

“But there are lots of people who are working hard and that’s what I want to support.

“My uncle was in his mid-60s. He was younger than average.

“He was this engaged and mobile individual who got clobbered with this awful disease which just came from nowhere.

“My play is set around this guy who is in his mid-50s, I would suppose, and he is living in his own childhood memories as a boy of ten. It’s about a guy who chooses to live in the memories of himself as a boy at school and the reason is that it’s easier for him to retain these longer-term memories than the shorter-term ones.

“I wrote it over a couple of years in various sessions. I don’t write full time and I had actually written it for someone else and then we had the pandemic and people were not allowed to publicly perform.

“I’m involved in a little theatre locally and they were saying that they wanted to get the theatre back on its feet and they wanted to do stuff around social issues that were quite challenging.

“I had this piece and I said to them it would be good to see it on its feet and performed and they suggested that I should do it.”

It went well and now Simon has returned to Drip Action, with whom he worked more than 20 years ago, to bring a production to West Sussex.

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