Hotel Modern shows the despair of a lady with dementia

The elderly lady at the centre of Rotterdam theatre company Hotel Modern’s Snail Trails is disoriented. Her eyes have the surprised, unseeing lustre of dementia, and her movements are woefully uncertain. What’s more, her living room is haunted: the objects in it have lives of their own. While she focuses on reading a garden magazine called Growth & Bloom, in an exemplary example of dramatic irony a spider spins its web between her demented head and a pig’s head hanging on the wall. A table leg suddenly snaps off; a penguin rolls past on wheels. She suddenly finds herself with a hugely overgrown left hand, causing surprise and horror in equal measure.

It is a tragic image of mental despair and confusion that Hotel Modern gives – and for those who have ever been to an old people’s home or nursing home, what we see here comes frightfully close. The sole cast member, Arlène Hoornweg, imitates in detail the way people with dementia look and move. The shuffling gait; the uncertain, groping hands. Yet the play is more than a silent portrait of dementia.

This company is dedicated to making theatre in which animated film, the visual arts and music go hand in hand. Once the old woman has very cautiously used a staircase to step down from stage, we are presented with a second play. As in the group’s earlier production The Great War (2001), the drama shifts from stage to screen. In a surrealistic big-city setting, the actor has become a small puppet who wanders in in a state of astonishment through the urban jungle. In this total re-creation in scale-model form we recognize familiar fragments of the skyline of Rotterdam or Berlin. The viewer’s experience of these noisy, busy and polluted metropolises is shot through with the confusion in the woman’s eyes. Rather than people, the buses transport big shrimps of the same type that appeared from her biscuit tin in the first act. Cars have been transformed into electric irons. I was particularly impressed by the scene in which she experiences an almost complete 24-hour cycle: from afternoon, to evening, to midnight with its wailing sirens, to the new dawn. All she does is sit there, lonely, her only company a starling-like bird made of feathers and paperclips.

And then something surprising happens: she takes a lift that rises at dizzying speed to the 800-and-somethingth floor of a skyscraper. The camera sweeps past the infinitely high building. Up on the roof is the bird, waiting for her, luring her to the edge of the abyss. The bird spreads its wings and flaps upwards; she follows him and she soars, like the bird, into the air– a beautiful ending. It is a pity, then, that there has to be a short apotheosis with smoke, a rhino and the old woman. Didn’t she, just a moment ago, rise up and escape the hostile world that had nothing more to say to her?

Snail Trails can be seen as a play about farewell and a yearning for death. When life has nothing to more to offer than a dishevelled bird as your faithful companion, why would you continue to roam the asphalt. The high, thin air is surely much more attractive? You can also see it as a death scene, a death caused by the indifference of society.
It is astonishing how Hotel Modern’s technically ingenious theatre makers manage to evoke all these thoughts, emotions and associations with just a few of the very simplest of tools and objects: a puppet placed between two small cubes and then filmed. Perhaps the beauty of this picture lies in the contrast between the human being personified by a doll – which in everyone triggers thoughts of childhood – and the true nature of this doll: an old, intensely lonely woman you feel compassion for and to who you would like to offer an arm for support. But that is impossible.

07-01-2002