After strains of "After You've Gone," curtain opens on a bedroom with fading flowered, green wallpaper, lighter where pictures have been removed. There's one door that Kemp first entered three days earlier, rushing because of a wire that his auntie, his sole living relative whom he hasn't seen in 30 years, is dying and wants to see him. There's one window through which he sees and often talks to or about the outside world. There's one chair for him to sit between the fringed-shaded lamp and bed where the old lady is propped up on pillows.
At first he's all smart remarks in skit-bits, like the ones Alan Davies, British TV and stand-up comic, is famous for, though not the comedy of death he indulges in as Kemp. "Do you want to donate your organs?" he asks as he brings his charge food that he argues about whether to salt. "Here, sign your will," he commands. "You're leaving everything to me." He'll have an estate auction, since funerals cost money and he quit his job to come. Maybe he'll have to quit feeding her the pudding that delights her so. After all, he's measured her for her casket and doesn't want her changing the dimensions. Winter turns to equally silent spring. Maybe cremation...with her ashes put in a pot; would she like to feed an amarylis? Kemp, angry at having left his supposedly "urbane, witty...well, at least droll" circle where people died in hospitals, considers himself fulfilling a duty. Reading "How to Grieve," Kemp wonders what happened to the pictures he sent her of himself as a youngster.
By summer, he's revealing his whole sad life, alienated from his alchoholic, druggie mother who dressed him as a girl, and a father who was "nothing" to either of them. His one recall of them looking for him was when he was lost. But they were really looking for their cat. With Kemp speaking more and more on a personal level, the play goes beyond clever one-liners and outrageous put-me-downs. Oh, there's still bits like: "Why are you putting on makeup? Why don't you let the mortician do that?" There's even an attempt at a Rube Goldberg electrocution device. (It goes astray.) All the while, there's mainly silence from the old woman, though the facial expressions of Margaret Tyzack reveal reactions and emotions only a great actress like her could make so varied, so expressive. In over a year of Kemp's self-revelations, not without visual jokes like his limited laundry and her secretly smoking, the two interact without exchanging many words.
They're obviously helping to quell each other's loneliness. She eats and knits. She sets up a kind of Christmas tree and has wrapped a gift for him. He gives her a New Year's Eve drink in a plastic glass. Yet he seems desperate: "If you don't die soon, it's going to kill me." It's when he decides to do something about it that the police come, and there's a revelation. A grand coup de theatre ...that leads to a sobering denouement.
The more I have thought about this play, the better I have thought of it. It will be remembered after the quips have been forgotten, and so will the tour de force performances of Davies and Tyzack.
