The latest collaboration between actor Emma Wilkinson-Wright, author Gail Louw, and director Anthony Shrubsall, Rika’s Rooms is currently playing at the Tabard.
Rika is an elderly Jewish woman with dementia, confused about her present but clear about the flashbacks to key times in her life. The play requires Wilkinson-Wright to play Rika from the age of 14 onwards, achieving this with physical and vocal changes.
It isn’t an easy watch. It faces the reality of the memory loss, violent outbursts, and paranoia associated with dementia very well. I thought long and hard about seeing the show as it is a topic I usually avoid, but it isn’t relentless through the plot.
Rika moves from pre-war Germany to Palestine, then South Africa and finally England. This is a solo show, but Rika’s Rooms is full of supporting characters – family, friends, acquaintances, health professionals.
It has frank language and scenes relating to sex and violence. It is also very funny, with a dark, morbid thread of humour throughout. As Rika reveals who she was in her life, we feel invested in the story.
Young Rika approaches her exile from Germany with a mixture of fear and excitement – by the end of her life she has become bitter, disconnected and lost in the past.
She encounters racial prejudice from both sides – as a Jew persecuted by the Nazis, and within a rich Jewish family in South Africa who maintain a low-paid Black servant.
She encounters sex as both a disadvantage and a political tool, eventually settling for a man who isn’t the one she loves, but the one she sits across from at the dining table, wondering about their connection. A fate that befalls many marriages.
This is a play that makes the most of its small stage. Two rooms – a bedroom, a living room – with a doorway each represent many, from a kibbutz to a nursing home, from a posh hotel lobby to a family dining room. Rika moves between them and their timelines, aided by the lighting changes (by Simon Beyer) to orient us.
It is a towering performance from Wilkinson-Wright, who could presumably carry this through without an interval, as that was how it was originally planned. It doesn’t really need the break.
I found it an emotional watch while admiring the adversity of this woman who clearly, to paraphrase poet Jenny Joseph, vowed to “grow old and wear purple”.
Rika’s Rooms offers the chance to experience a fine drama up close. It conjures up visual cues that enhance the story, with vibrant characterisations. The rich collaboration between actor, director and writer pays off here just as it did in last year’s “ADHD? WTF is ADHD!”.
A strong 4 stars.
Rika’s Rooms continues at Theatre at the Tabard until 25 Jul – details here.
Photo credit: Paddy Gormley