Ever since Tricky Hat Productions started asking Cumbernauld pensioners "are you dancin'?" – recording their responses and anecdotes on video and in text – all kinds of stories have emerged.
Some harked back to a happy past, when Glasgow's ballrooms were akin to dating agencies and partners for the waltz often became partners for life in the brave new town of Cumbernauld. Other stories were not so blithe, and it's this material, with its glimpses into the downsides of growing old that director Fiona Miller has shaped into a touching yet ultimately harrowing professional production.
Black and white footage of elderly couples dancing, or just sitting in immobile silence, comes and goes like a fleeting memory on the back wall while Mick Slaven's music has melodic echoes of the 1960's heyday of the dancers, fused with a romantic wistfulness borne of nostalgia. Alice (Linda Duncan McLaughlan) is struggling with the grief that has left her more or less house-bound since the death of her husband. Willie (David Gallacher) is dealing with another kind of grief: his wife Margaret (Carrie Mancini) is fading into the limbo of Alzheimer's. She no longer elbows into his pawky, comic tales of family life with cheery corrections; instead she weeps silently as an overworked carer (McLaughlan again, chillingly breezy) chivvies her, unwashed, into a night-gown. Alice, meanwhile, has turned once again to "the dancing", albeit partnered by a female friend. Her grip on life is an affirmation we all crave, but it's what befalls Willie and Margaret that haunts and unnerves us, not least because it's so honestly and unhistrionically portrayed.
Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, May 17.
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