Quarter Life Crisis // Yolanda Mercy

This lyrical monologue documents the quarter-life crisis of its main character Alicia Adewale. It’s the crisis that comes about through that odd return to childhood forced on graduates and young people by unaffordable rents, casualisation and wealth inequality. The one of leaving home, achieving independence and then returning as though nothing has changed. This tension is at the heart of the performance, the comforting familiarity of being back in a parent’s house and slipping back into the childhood role that goes with it. Embracing unquestioning support, less as an alternative to independence as much as one of the only options available.

The performance is built out of teenage and twenty-something memories and reflections on nights out, with the changing lives of friends and potential new responsibilities looming into focus. And as much as Adewale, a young Londoner of Nigerian descent, measures herself against friends and their marriages, children and homes, she also compares her situation to the histories of parents and distant relatives. The age she is now the same age as her mother was when she had her. The same age as grandparents who left their homes for a better life, the same age as ancestors were elected king or stolen as slaves. Adults, independent and fully formed, with a strong sense of who they were, and yet she still relies on her mother for everything.

But what Quarter Life Crisis correctly implies is that this deferral of adulthood is not the fault of the young people it traps. The tabloid label of the ‘boomerang generation’ deemphasises the responsibilities of those gone before. The shift away from job security in favour of the gig economy, and the housing crisis that leaves flats unavailable and houses unattainable, was not initiated by Adewale’s generation. Nor was the wild variation between the pay of those at the top and those just starting out. The delay in independence is simply a consequence of late capitalism.

The state of the Young Person’s Railcard, something referenced throughout the performance, reveals this truth. The recently announced extensions, the 26 to 30-year-old ‘Young Workers’ card, continues to move the goalposts of achieving full adulthood past your twenties entirely. Absent from the conversation is the idea that the current economy is unsustainable, that in a situation where 30 years old requires a discount simply to travel to work it might be a deeper, more structural problem that needs addressing.

-       Lewis Church 

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Yolanda Mercy  - Quarter Life Crisis

Is the New 25-30 Railcard Just An Attempt to Distract? – The Badger

Boomerang Children - Guardian

Lack of Choice and Moving Back Home – The DeBrief

Young People’s Changing Routes to Independence (2002) – Joseph Rowntree Foundation

DollyWould // Sh!t Theatre

Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, was named after Dolly Parton, the country singer, who has a theme park in America, which is near the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Center, which is sometimes known as a 'body farm'. Written down, the links between these things feel tenuous, but in Sh!t Theatre's DollyWould, they intermingle in a joyful and chaotic exploration of celebrity, fandom, duplication, preservation and decay.

When she was born, in 1996, Dolly the sheep had a white face, which indicated that she was indeed a clone (otherwise she would have had a black face like her surrogate mother). The research that produced her, at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, was exploring ways to introduce new genes into an animal. Already by the 1980s, scientists could do this in mice by manipulating embryonic stem cells, but such cells from larger mammals were not available, so cloning was a potential alternative for enhancing livestock. Today, genome editing tools like Crispr/Cas can be used much more easily to the same effect.

Dolly the sheep was cloned from two cells: one was an egg cell, the other an adult sheep's mammary gland cell. Mammary glands produce milk, whether in ovine udders or human breasts, and this, rather than any similarity between their hair, was why she was named after Dolly Parton. Essential to human life - all mammalian life, in fact - as well as to the Parton story, breasts are an integral part of this show. Through playing clips from media interviews over the years, DollyWould notes that Parton has endured much curiosity about her body, especially her breasts (are they natural or enhanced?), her weight and her sexuality. 

Dolly the sheep died in 2003. Juxtaposing the Dollys' stories with the body farm focuses attention on death, decay and whatever comes after. As for this show and what may come after, Sh!t Theatre seem intent on following Parton's own definition of success: 'Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, scare 'em a little bit and then leave'.

- Michael Regnier

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

DollyWould - Sh!t Theatre

The Life of Dolly - Roslin Institute

Towards Dolly: Edinburgh, Roslin and the Birth of Modern Genetics - Edinburgh University Library Centre for Research Collections 

What is Gene-Editing and How Does It Work? - Royal Society 

Dollywood

This Is What Happens When You Die - Mosaic

The Body Farm - Atlas Obscura

Descent // A Moment White Productions

In Ancient Greece, tragedy was when a character fell to an inevitable fate, usually the consequence of some small mistake in their past. Attempts to escape or thwart this fate only locked them in more tightly. By this definition, Descent is a true tragedy, except that the past mistake was not the central character's but perhaps a small, undetectable error in his genetic code that made him susceptible to dementia.

For Rob, it starts with the loss of his pen, hinting innocuously at memory problems but actually foreshadowing the fundamental loss of identity that dementia will bring. The turning point is when he loses his temper with his daughter over a trivial board game. He accuses her of cheating, calls her a bitch. Research shows we perceive that someone with dementia has changed not when they lose their memories, but when their moral compass goes haywire. 'That's not him', Rob's daughter tells us.

Rob feels himself 'metamorphosing', referring explicitly to Kafka's novella. There is now a hard shell that stops him caring so much about other people's feelings. But it is not only Rob who is in descent. His wife, Cathy, is undergoing her own transformation as she takes on the responsibility of caring for her husband even as he starts caring less for her. The actors playing the couple in this production make their metamorphoses stark, seeming to age years under the stage lights even as the lights in both their eyes go dim.

Rob experiences paranoia - he suspects everyone of moving or even hiding his pen - and is at times physically aggressive towards Cathy. These are common, if less well-known symptoms of dementia. There are hints, too, at the incontinence and loss of physical control that follows. Rob and Cathy are still in their 50s - the prime of life. They were not expecting to have to consider carers and care homes. About 4% of people with dementia are under 65, and it can bring different challenges to living with dementia in later life. It can be harder to recognise and diagnose, and can mean more impact on younger families. Cathy starts grieving Rob before he dies. He has already gone, and the rest is inevitable.

- Michael Regnier

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Descent

Early-Onset Alzheimer's Disease - Alzheimer's Research UK

Symptoms - Alzheimer's Society

Carers: Looking After Yourself - Alzheimer's Society 

Neurodegeneration and Identity - Psychological Science (2015) 

The Inevitability of Tragedy - Edge Induced Cohesion (2013) 

Hear Me Raw // LipSink Theatre

Hear Me Raw dissects the culture of ‘clean eating’ through a semi-fictionalised monologue based in the personal experience of its performer. Questioning the logic of whether raw smoothies and matcha provide any real solution to deeper emotional problems, Daniella Isaacs blends her real story of acute anxiety and distress with an imagined identity as a food blogger. As ‘Green Girl’, Isaacs evangelises about the need to remove dairy from your diet, replace caffeine and deny sugar, with all the zealotry of a convert. But the stability of this identity is disrupted by the interventions of concern from family, friends and clinical professionals. Isaacs’ clean eating obsession, watched over by the sinister figure of now-disgraced prophet Belle Gibson, grows into a recipe for distress, a diagnosis of Orthorexia Nervosa, and a familial rift.

Alongside its expose of the sometimes-worrying orthodoxy of clean eating adherents, and the modern obsession with demonstrable ‘wellness’, Hear Me Raw also reveals more general problems. Isaacs, graduating from drama school at the start of her story, embodies the anxieties of the modern twenty-something, particularly in the industries of theatre and performance. Her bullshit job typing up casting calls for ‘hot ex-girlfriends’ is a clear reference to the pressures of conforming to industry ideals, and to the unrealistic expectations for young performers that stifle the industry. Encouragingly, there seems to today be a greater awareness of the importance of diverse bodies in theatre, film and television, and a slowly building intolerance for retrograde casting practices. Here a young actor discusses the gulf between her expectation of fame and success and the realities of trying to get there, within the frame of a show that itself gestures towards that same frustrated expectation.

Isaacs suggests at the close that she had previously promised never to make an autobiographical show. Hear Me Raw is defiantly autobiographical, and is at its best when it abandons ‘acting’ in favour of personal testimony. Its central performance is not a dramatic role, but a sharing of a personal story, and a repudiation of the pressures that provoke the quarterlife crisis. 

- Lewis Church

This diagnosis is based on a preview performance at Hackney Showroom, London. Hear Me Raw runs throughout the Fringe at Underbelly George Square.

 

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Hear Me Raw

Orthorexia Nervosa

“Clean eating” How good is it for you? – BBC News

Belle Gibson Court Case – Guardian

The Quarterlife Crisis - Guardian

Lady Parts (Sexist Casting Calls)

Drama Graduates One Year On – The Stage

Touch // DryWrite

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

- Rebecca West

In her new play Touch, Vicky Jones explores what the fruits of feminism are, and questions who has the real power in a relationship. Dee, a 33-year-old single woman, has left a failed relationship in Wales to establish herself and make a life in London. She tries to connect with herself and build meaningful connections through a variety of online dating sites, but each liaison widens the gap between her expectations and reality.

Dee confronts Miles, an older man who is part of a group involved with S&M, and argues that he is trying to make her weak. ‘It’s no fun for me if you are weak’ he responds, because that is the game. We pretend we are strong to be mastered by another. Although Dee talks as if she is in control of each relationship, she is actually a victim of what her partners want from her. Eddie, the first man we meet on stage, tells her that ‘there are woman out there who are doing better than you at being a woman. Who enjoy being a woman. And who have their fucking shit together’. But getting her shit together is the very reason Dee rented her tiny bedsit in London.

The big question becomes one of what being a woman is supposed to be in this liberal, forward-thinking twenty-first century. As Elf Lyons writes:

You can’t use multiple relationships to fill the void and give you the gratification that you should be able to give yourself. More love doesn’t mean better love. If you are dating multiple people in order to enhance your self-worth, you end up feeling like out-of-date hummus, feeling jealous anytime anyone chooses to spend time with anyone else, resulting in you treating your partners badly and without respect. 

And this is exactly what happens not just to Dee, but to far too many single thirty-something women, with their biological clock ticking, their hormones buzzing and constant reminders that they are not cohabiting, reproducing, or being what they thought they would be at this stage of their lives. 

Some of the confusion rests with the new generation of men who support the concepts of feminism and yet do not know what is expected of them as partners. As Mark White writes in Psychology Today 

It is difficult for men, especially those of us who appreciate and embrace the importance of being respectful and considerate toward women, to balance those attitudes with the animalistic, non-rational expressions of passion and desire that women want from us.

That is the dilemma faced by singles today. We have commercialized sex to the point where partners are touted as objects to shop for on sites like Tinder or in pornography for momentary excitement and passion, but when it comes to the long haul we are at a loss. No one knows how to react. Just where is the line between subservience and co-operation, dominance and abusive control? 

-       Lynn Ruth Miller

Touch is at the Soho Theatre, London until August 26th 2017. A new production of DryWrite's  Fleabag is at Underbelly, George Square during the Fringe from 21st-27th August.

 

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Touch - Soho Theatre

Fleabag - Underbelly George Square

Why Men Find It So Hard to Understand What Women Want - Psychology Today

Women’s Attitudes Toward Sex - Huffington Post

Has Feminism Worked? - Telegraph

Elf Lyons - Polyamory: A New Way to Love

THE ME // Sun Apparatus Theatre Company

On Saturday the 27th of August 2016, it was confirmed that Mbah Gotho was the oldest person in the world, after he produced documentation that proved he was born on the 31st of December 1870. When Gotho was born (145 years ago) Ulysses S. Grant was the President of the United States, Italy was being unified, and Charles Dickens had just died. Indonesia, the country of his birth, was a Dutch colony. He would have been 74 when World War 2 ended, and is still living now.
 
The ME is about ageing, and the quest for longevity. It’s about the very human desire to resist death and the value of the one life you’ll get to lead before it’s snuffed out. Its protagonists are chasing immortality and the promise of experiencing the span of history Gotho has. It’s a gentle satire of wellness and pseudo-science, of new-age fixation and hollow self-improvement. Melody, the insufferable character at the centre of the story abuses her maid Lita as she joylessly swigs kombucha, seaweed health drinks or whatever else, before an absurd sequence of events introduces her to an unhinged researcher of how-to-cheat-death. This scientist of dubious ethics makes vague references to planarian worms, a sci-fi trope found in everything from Star Trek to Swamp Thing to denote unknowable potential for regeneration. Her crazed experiments are vaguely reminiscent of Serge Voronoff’s monkey-testicle grafts, the Russian scientist whose placebo experiments later inspired the vicious revolutionary critique of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. Like many other plays, films and books, The ME suggests a denial of mortality is the dark underside of medical science.
 
The world will change and leave us behind. By the time death comes it might be greeted without fear, as the world we find ourselves in has changed beyond all recognition. A long life is not the same as a good one, as the characters in The ME discover. Who knows how the world will develop as we age? Might it end, or continue to change? During the still continuing life of Mbah Gotho the telephone went from a new invention to a ubiquitous tool. He was alive before the first petrol engine was created. None of us know how long we have, or what we might see.

- Lewis Church

The ME ran at ZOO until August 28th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/me

The Sun Apparatus Theatre Company: http://www.thesunapparatus.com
 
Oldest Person in the World - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/worlds-oldest-person-man-mbah-gotho-indonesia-145-years-old-a7213191.html
 
Planarian Worms: https://www.exploratorium.edu/imaging_station/research/planaria/story_planaria.pdf
 
Regrowing Heads and Keeping Memories: http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/16/decapitated-worms-regrow-heads-keep-old-memories/
 
Serge Voronoff: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-true-story-of-dr-voronoffs-plan-to-use-monkey-testicles-to-make-us-immortal
 
What the World Might Look Like in 100 Years: http://www.realclearlife.com/2016/09/01/this-is-what-the-world-might-look-like-in-100-years/

SWEET CHILD OF MINE // Bron Batten

While Bron Batten’s performance of Sweet Child of Mine (seemingly) did not seek to directly explore ideas of ageing and care; making the piece with her father led to an additional layer of performance gently weaving itself in. In this piece, the lines between Bron’s relationship to her parents on and off stage begin to blur.

In the piece, the artist interviews her parents about what they imagine she does for a living. This projected, hardly edited, documentary-like footage of Batten’s conversations with her parents gets us to think about art and performance. What are they for? Who might they be aimed at? What’s the point of it all?

For Bron Batten, those questions led to her making and touring a performance with her father for the last five years. Performance becomes a way of finding out more about each other, and of opening out a conversation across generations and on both sides of the fourth wall.

This, however is not the performance that was presented during this Edinburgh Fringe. Not quite. Due to an unforeseen illness, Bron Batten’s father, James has been unable to travel to Scotland to perform the show with his daughter.

With ten days to go until the start of the festival, Batten sought support from the local arts community to recruit local dads to stand in for her own.

Beyond the comment and gentle satire of contemporary art, James Batten’s absence - and his daughter’s decision* that ‘the show must go on’ - bring an additional signifying layer to the piece. Indeed, with life expectancy having significantly increased in recent decades, most people currently enjoy longer adult relationships with their parents. As these relationships evolve over time, carer/cared for dynamics shift. In Sweet Child of Mine, Bron Batten is now ‘orphaned’ on stage, and beyond the theatrical framework, we become aware that she will soon become a carer to her ageing parents.

Elsewhere, in Joanna Griffin’s Bricking It, while her father Patrick is indeed present on stage with her, the absence felt is that of their mother and wife whose death prompted the making of the piece, during which Griffin jokingly asserts; “it’s cheaper to bring my dad on stage with me than to put him in a care home”.

A few Fringes ago, Simon Bowes took to the stage with his father in a poetic exploration of the passing of time, with his mother watching from the front row, prepared with cue cards for her husband. A whole family present, but the disappearing of memories and the perceived increase in the speed of time passing.

Opening up their personal relationships to their makers’ families, each of those performances invites us to consider and re-define how we might choose to age, and manage ageing alongside our kin.

- Leo Burtin

* It feels important to note that the performance itself doesn’t inform us as to whether the decision to adapt the performance to accommodate James Batten’s absence was artistically driven or purely circumstantial.

Sweet Child of Mine ran at Gilded Balloon Teviot until August 29th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/sweet-child-of-mine

Journal of Marriage & Family article on intergenerational bonds: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2001.00001.x/full

Annual Review of Sociology article on intergenerational family relations in adulthood: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27800075?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Bron Batten’s website: https://bronbatten.com/

Information on Bricking It: https://making-room.co.uk/portfolio/bricking-it/

Information on Kings of England’s Where We Live & What We Live For featuring Simon Bowes and his father: http://kingsofengland.tumblr.com/WWL&WWLF

(I COULD GO ON SINGING) SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW // FK Alexander

The volume of this work is at the level of trembling clothes. An affective noise that moves bodies and governs the internal rhythms of an audience to match its ritual of dialogue balladry. The singer is standing in a washed-out strobe aurora with a mic lead coiled in her punk rock grip, hand-in-hand with one from the crowd. The crowd let it lull them into a meditative state.

Noise is often a subtle charming of our unconscious reactions, whether the drip-drip of an irritating tap or the hollow roar of a train-journey tunnel. It holds and releases insides and surface, quivering and dimpling and pushing you back, fading into the background with time but rearranging you as you stand. It bathes and heals and envelops your stresses, leeching it back through vibrations that heal. FK Alexander enters into eye-contracts of healing interaction flanked by the two noisy sentinels of her co-performers. For an hour after entering you stand, sit or shuffle in the space at the limit of aural endurance, until leaving into the shocking quiet. It’s sound as a weapon targeting isolation, and sound as a healing force, bridging bodies in the room.

The work is a cover version of a performance moment, a reinterpretation of a numbingly repeated song to convey the hurt and poignance of the final performance of an aging star. Clattering drums and odd discordance augment the familiar Hollywood build to a transcendent moment of cathartic release. The formality of dressing, undressing, and holding hands acts out a serenade as an engagement. When Judy Garland died of an overdose of barbiturates in 1969 it was an overstimulation to the point of limit. The noise here is an overstimulation, but one that heals as much as that other destroyed. (LC)

(I Could Go On Singing) Over The Rainbow ran at Summerhall Basement until August 28th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/i-could-go-on-singing-over-the-rainbow

FK Alexander: https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/artists/fk-alexander

A History of Using Sound as a Weapon: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-history-of-using-sound-as-a-weapon

Sound Healing: http://qz.com/595315/turns-out-sound-healing-can-be-actually-well-healing/

Come On, Feel the Noise (Paul Hegarty): https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/nov/10/squarepusher-paul-hegarty-noise

Clip of Judy Garland’s Final Television Performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJhHPTBjzac

The Second Summer of Hate: Noise Rock Now (The Quietus): http://thequietus.com/articles/19966-noise-rock-2016-reviews

Okishima Island Tourist Association Shoot: http://www.kovoroxsound.com/OKISHIMA%20ISLAND%20TOURIST%20ASSOCIATION%20-%20SHOOT.html

ZERO DOWN // Angel On The Corner TC

Among the 17 women interviewed or writing first-person about their experience of political activism in Helena Earnshaw and Angharad Penrhyn Jones' invigorating book Here We Stand is Eileen Chubb, founder of the charity and campaign Compassion in Care. She became, much to her own surprise, an activist after working for years in care homes run by Bupa, and discovering widespread abuse of the elderly inhabitants. At the bottom of the homepage of the CiC website is a melancholy dedication to Pat Gifford that reads: “After witnessing the abuse of a loved one in a care home, Pat Gifford was so affected by this experience that she became increasingly afraid of growing older and needing care herself that she took her own life.”

Zero Down is set in a small-town care home in which abuse of the elderly patients is carried out on a daily basis: not by staff but by management, who allow the store cupboard to run out of wet wipes and humans to sit in their own faeces for hours before bothering to send a nurse to them. These are all typical of the routine cost-cutting carried out by an organisation run in the service of profitability and not in accord with basic humanity. Working on zero-hour contracts, the nurses are expected to pass their shift not at bedsides but in a staff room, waiting to be summoned by electronic buzzer to a specific patient, clocking in only as and when they are called. Unsurprisingly, this raises the women's own stress levels and sets them at odds with each other.

Writer Sarah Hehir tells two stories here: the visible one of the working women on stage, and the invisible one of the disintegrating humans trapped in their beds. One of the nurses, Benni, is a single mother of three at the mercy of a neoliberal economy, failing to keep her head above water because the system is constructed for her to drown: sympathy for her contracts each time she spews a racist slur, then expands as she reveals her detailed knowledge of individual patients' tastes, habits and frailties. That kindness is contrasted with the exploitative purpose of Erin, an aspiring journalist reading up on female war reporters as she attempts to make her mark by following the example of Eileen Chubb. The distance between conniving Erin and compassionate Eileen becomes clear, however, when the young woman confesses that changing the soiled nappy of a patient makes her think that euthanasia is a good idea. Her tone creates an ambiguity as to whether she means self-elective.

The picture of decrepitude that Hehir presents has almost nothing appealing about it. It's not just a dramatic construct that Benni is the mother of small children: whether at home or at work, her life is one of changing nappies. But she also describes carrying a male patient to the toilet to spare his feelings of mortification at being so infantilised: an act of generosity that helps him continue to value his life. But that generosity also requires the energy of the young: in Michael Haneke's acutely observed film Amour, an elderly man grows unable to care for his declining wife, and when money can no longer buy what she needs, he, like Erin, begins to see euthanasia as their only option. The question woven through both strands of Zero Down is one of value: how shall we value human existence, and what happens when power and profit are the margins or expression of that value?

- MC

Zero Down is on at 13.00 at Pleasance Courtyard until August 29th (not 18th). Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Hearing Loop - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/zero-down

Publisher page for Here We Stand: http://www.honno.co.uk/dangos.php?ISBN=9781909983021

Compassion in Care: http://www.compassionincare.com/

What exactly is neoliberalism?: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/booked-3-what-exactly-is-neoliberalism-wendy-brown-undoing-the-demos

Alexander Zeldin discussing Beyond Caring, his play about workers on zero-hours contracts: http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/the-director-as-god-is-bullshit/

Diary of a woman who chose euthanasia: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/23/euthanasia.cancer

Two views on Haneke's Amour: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/feb/28/amour-advert-for-euthanasia and http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/surviving-amour

FINDING JOY // Vamos Theatre

Without words, and with masks, Finding Joy explores the impact dementia has on both the person with the disorder, and the people around them. Joy is a widow, living independently. She's visited regularly by her daughter and grandson, who witness her gradual deterioration. It starts with Joy putting strange items in the fridge, and a mix-up between some salad cream and some milk, and ends with her retreating into the past as the present becomes too confusing.

Dementia is a progressive disorder. It affects how the brain works, and in particular the ability to remember, think and reason. According to the Alzheimer’s Society, 850,000 people in the UK suffer from dementia. Worldwide, it's estimated that 135 million people will be living with it by 2050, and there have been warnings that a 'dementia tsunami' is coming. That said, the age-specific risk is thought to be falling, for men at least. The New Scientist reported this April that incidence of dementia in men in the UK has fallen by 41 per cent; there was only a 2.5 per cent drop for women.

There's no cure for dementia, and treatment tends to focus on making people's lives as comfortable and dignified as possible. In Finding Joy, the grandson visits one day bearing the gift of a toy dog. It's a glove puppet, which he brings to comic life to the sheer delight of his grandmother. At moments it seems like Joy thinks it's real dog, at others it's clear she knows it's make believe. Either way, the dog makes her happy and eases her distress.

In the real world, some dementia patients are being treated with PARO, a robot harp seal, and the results seem positive. Researchers at the University of Brighton say PARO reduces agitation and aggression, and promotes social interaction. An article in The Guardian quotes Claire Jepson, an occupational therapist at a specialist assessment unit for dementia patients. She says the robot seal 'allows people to still feel a sense of achievement, a sense of identity. They become the carer instead of the cared for.' Put simply, the robot is enabling some patients to find joy.

- HB

Finding Joy played Assembly Hall at 16:30 until 14 August - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/finding-joy

'What is dementia?': http://www.ageuk.org.uk/health-wellbeing/conditions-illnesses/dementia/what-is-dementia/

Alzheimer's Society: https://www.alzheimers.org.uk

Alzheimer's Research UK: http://www.alzheimersresearchuk.org

Dementia was one of the challenges nominated for the 2014 Longitude Prize: https://longitudeprize.org/challenge/dementia

'Dementia incidence for over 65s has fallen drastically in UK men': https://www.newscientist.com/article/2084859-dementia-incidence-for-over-65s-has-fallen-drastically-in-uk-men/

University of Brighton's PARO Project: https://www.brighton.ac.uk/healthresearch/research-projects/the-paro-project.aspx

'How Paro the robot seal is being used to help UK dementia patients': https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jul/08/paro-robot-seal-dementia-patients-nhs-japan

'PARO Therapeutic Robot': http://www.parorobots.com

Magic Me, UK-based intergenerational arts organisation who run arts programmes with residential care homes, inc. people with dementia: http://magicme.co.uk

OUTSIDE THE BOX - A LIVE SHOW ABOUT DEATH / Liz Rothschild

“Talking about sex doesn’t make you pregnant, talking about death doesn’t make you die.” This quote from Jane Duncan Rogers appears on the flyer for Liz Rothschild’s thought-provoking and unexpectedly jolly show about death. Although the subject matter is literally morbid and Rothschild’s description of washing the body of her dead mother moved me to tears, it’s hard not to smile while watching someone weave their own wicker coffin to the strains of Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life – apparently the UK’s top choice of funeral song.
 
Rothschild is a funeral celebrant who runs a ‘green’ burial ground and is full of lively passion about death. Through personal stories she exposes the taboos in our society, explaining how death has become disconnected from family, community and wider society in our modern age.  She points out that every town will have NCT childbirth groups, but where are the death groups? After all, we’re all born, but we all die too. Most of the audience had heard of Braxton Hicks – the ‘practice’ contractions that start towards the end of pregnancy – yet only two people were familiar with Cheyne-Stokes, the changed pattern of breathing that can signify the end is near.
 
She also highlights the shocking fact that around 70 per cent of us will die without leaving a will or a less formal letter of wishes. This can mean that people end up without the burial they would have wanted, and even leave funeral costs unplanned for and unpaid. At the same time, we’re warned about the ‘death industry’, with some unscrupulous souls willing to exploit a lucrative and reliable customer base plagued with grief and guilt. The show certainly prompted me to think about the plans for my own demise (or rather, the current total lack of them) and realise that it’s a subject I’ve never broached with any of my family.
 
Medical science still cannot heal those who are finally dying, and at some point it will be our time to go. Although funerals are for the living rather than the dead, out of respect for human dignity and agency, we should be starting conversations about death right now. (KA)
 
Outside The Box - A Live Show About Death is on at 11.50 at Summerhall until August 21st. Relaxed Performances - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/outside-the-box-a-live-show-about-death

More on the Death on the Fringe series: https://deathonthefringe.wordpress.com/

Compassion in Dying: http://compassionindying.org.uk/

The DeathCafe movement, running events aiming to encourage public conversations about death: http://deathcafe.com/

The Good Funeral Guide: http://www.goodfuneralguide.co.uk/

Final Fling – advice on life and death decisions as well as planning tools: https://www.finalfling.com/

Hospice UK, for information about hospice care at the end of life: https://www.hospiceuk.org/

Living Well Dying Well train doulas (companions) for the dying and run public and professional courses http://www.lwdwtraining.uk/

Natural Death Centre, providing free advice about death and burial: http://naturaldeath.org.uk/

Research paper on public attitudes to death, dying and bereavement from Nottingham University: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/srcc/documents/projects/srcc-project-summary-public-attitudes.pdf

Cheyne-Stokes breathing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyne%E2%80%93Stokes_respiration