Finborough Theatre, London SW10
Stewart Permutt is a dramatist who writes with compassion but without the baggage of sentimentality. The people who populate his plays are more likely to reveal disappointment than hope. Yet they win you over, not by appealing to your sympathy but by revealing their humanity.
It is a quality I missed in Permutt’s latest offering, set partly in a Jewish old-age home in Hendon where Miriam Karlin’s wheelchair-bound Stella is nursed by Elizabeth Uter’s hijab-wearing Muslim carer Sadia, a Somalian refugee.
Karlin’s performance is disturbingly well observed, her confused and agitated Stella soothed to lucidity by Uter’s caring Sadia. But less convincing are the two gay relationships with which Permutt explores his themes of living with disappointment and the fear of loneliness.
