SIFA 2015: Proton Theatre’s Dementia is an emotional rollercoaster ride

SINGAPORE – With a title and subject matter as grim as dementia, one may expect a heavy or bittersweet evening. However, Dementia, presented by the Proton Theatre as part of this year’s Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) packs a emotional roller-coaster flight of comedy and melodrama in 115 minutes.

Its story about a psychiatric hospital on the verge of eviction is inspired by an actual expulsion of a Budapest asylum in 2008. Director Kornel Mundruczo manages to draw the audience into the individual stories and psyche of each dementia patient, from an aging opera diva to a deranged dentist. The strong cast served up convincing and endearing characters beyond the caricatures, especially Nurse Nora (played by Annamaria Lang).

As one enters the theatre, one is immediately greeted by the sound of static and the character, Dr Szatmary, who breaks the fourth wall by scrutinising the audience with a gleeful grin from the ledge of the stage, complete with a donation box in tow. A sprightly Nurse busies herself as the patients fumble around the ward.

The over-the-top Bartonek (Janos Szemenyei) and the Doctor are a delightful duo who spar through song and dance, juxtaposing capitalism and ethics. There is great comic timing and crowd-pleasing moments, such as when they break into a rendition of Vienna Blood as the Dementia Band. Beneath the dark comedy, director Mundruczo infuses an undercurrent of despondency and inevitability of the hospital giving way to commercial construction.

The detailed set by Márton Agh was not only a realistic, two-level derelict ward complete with peeling tiles and a working shower, the entire walls of the ward subsequently folded up later into the play, encasing its unfortunate inhabitants metaphorically and physically.

The play teases with sexual innuendos and humour in one moment, but jolts the audience like a Little Shop of Hungarian Horrors in the next. One could hear gasps in the audience when Nurse Dora washes the sullied bottom of a nude patient in the shower, a slice of life reminding us of the grim reality that caregivers face.

There was a heaviness as one watched the patients being abused during the farcical tests to forcibly deem them well enough to be discharged. (It was a bittersweet anti-climax when they decide to leave via train but depart by forming said train with their hospital beds.)

While there may be a slight overuse of nudity, the play’s use of music, projection and hand-held cameras was quite effective to frame certain scenes and monologues. During the finale, the characters prepared to end their lives (with foreshadowing by the Doctor who offered a poetic preamble that will only take a minute) about the time that a sparkler lasts, with each character given a sparkler. There was a heaviness in the theatre, as one by one the sparkler that each character held fizzled out and the theatre was plunged in darkness.

Eventually one person in the audience started clapping but still the silence ensued. It was not until the characters stood up for the curtain call that the tension finally broke and gave way to heartfelt applause. The play invites us to reflect on the dilemma of the choices that society and the self makes when it weighs progress, gains and ethics.

Just like the word “Remember” - etched on the door in the last scene - Dementia and its social commentary will stay in our memories for some time to come.

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