Last Words, July 26, 2019 ***

THEATRE

Written, co-devised and performed by Joseph Sherman, produced by La Mama 

At La Mama Courthouse, until Aug 4, 2019  

Reviewer: Kate Herbert (on Fri July 26)

Stars: ***

Review also published in Herald Sun Arts, Tues July 30, 2019. KH

Joseph Sherman, Last Words, pic by Paul Dunn

Joseph Sherman’s Last Words is a gentle, poignant and intensely personal performance about Sherman’s Russian-Jewish parents’ journey from Odessa to Nunawading, followed by his father’s heartbreaking decline into dementia.

In this show, directed unobtrusively by John Bolton, Sherman roams around a display of black-and-white family photos, telling tales of his parents, Rebecca and Michael’s fraught marriage, mismatched families and quirky business ventures.

Initially, the piece is conversational and intermittently humorous, as the photos and Sherman’s childhood memories spark stories of Odessa, his parents and grandparents, and Stalinist Russia.

Sherman recalls the writings of a dissident poet, Odessa’s Black Market that was actually a market, and a street that changed its name from Karl Marx Street to Hitler Street.

But all is not well between Rebecca and Michael before they leave Odessa in 1974 to travel to Melbourne, where they divorce a few years later.

Memory is key in Sherman’s family saga, and he gently reminds us from the beginning that both his parents died with Alzheimer’s.

The more playful, early narration gives way to a short, compelling, but light-hearted lecture – complete with chalkboard diagrams and a wire model of the brain – about the damage done by Alzheimer’s as it destroys the capacity to create new memories or imagine the future.

By the final scenes, the performance becomes more theatrical as Sherman transports us to a darker place where he is immersed in his father’s confusion, disorientation, and loss of memory and identity.

Accompanied by Christopher Bolton who plays piano while eerily chanting lyrics, Sherman speaks Russian almost exclusively in the last scene, giving the audience some sense of his ailing father’s bewilderment.

We take memory for granted, whether it is to remember the good or the bad in our lives and, in Last Words, the pain of a son watching his father fade from the world is palpable.

by Kate Herbert

Directed and co-devised by John Bolton

Music Composition and Performance by Chris Bolton

Designed by Brian Lipson

Lighting Design by Shane Grant

Joseph Sherman, Last Words, pic by Paul Dunn