Red Bus Londinium Life

Diveen Henry is the Miss Myrtle in Miss Myrtle’s Garden and is the heart of this tender, witty and devastating play that explores the crumbling awareness that haunts many at the end of their lives, currently in its premiere run at the Bush Theatre.

Director Taio Lawson and writer Danny James King cleverly shepherd the audience down the same increasingly muddled byways, back streets and dead ends that Myrtle’s thoughts are travelling. The family experience of memory loss can be a devastating and lonely journey; this beautiful piece allows audiences to recognise that is also an experience that many have or will share.

Set within a first-generation Jamaican family home in Peckham, family and close friends are central – husband Melrose (Mensah Bediako); grandson Rudy (Michael Ahomka-Lindsay); his “friend” Jason (Elander Moore) and Myrtle’s older Irish friend (Gary Lilburn). Each dance attendance on Myrtle in their own different ways, craving praise from Myrtle that only infrequently arrives and enduring barbed insults that are delivered by Henry with wit and precision. External support for Myrtle is slow in forthcoming, an accurate experience according to the Alzheimer’s Society who have found that non-white British often face delays in dementia diagnosis and barriers in accessing services.

Lighting by Joshua Gadsby and sound by Dan Balfour move us between each scene with echoes (children? neighbours? wind?) hinting at snippets of memories not explored or explained. At first, the extended periods of darkness seemed overlong but were perhaps an intended choice designed to help us feel some of Myrtle’s discomfort.

The play is performed in the round and the set (Khadija Raza) is a garden where all the action plays out – except one nightclub scene. One curiosity is that the plants shown in the garden did not seem to reflect Myrtle and Melrose’s Jamaican heritage. A recent exhibition at the Garden Museum Sowing Roots would suggest that many Jamaican immigrants in South London at this time would have been trying to grow tastes of home.

Diveen Henry is utterly believable as an ailing octogenarian – with her costumes (also Khadija Raza) and shuffling, creaky movement (movement direction by Yarit Dor) adding to the plausibility. Henry captures her fickleness and acerbity so that her love and lack of surprise when her grandson comes out to her as gay seems as fitting as her banning of a beloved cat from the home for ingratitude.

Miss Myrtle’s Garden could be a painful watch but in Danny James King’s deft hands it balances poignancy with affection and wry amusement. It presents important subject matter and is well worth a trip to Shepherd’s Bush.

[Thank you to Bush Theatre for a gifted ticket for an honest review].