I Have Lost Myself
A poetic and humourous time travelling adventure into the splintered world of Alzheimer's disease.A traveller in time forgets where he is. Roads fall off a map. A brain rides on a train. Two neurons go into a pub. A man remembers only things that never happened. A dark secret lies buried in the bottom of a suitcase.
I Have Lost Myself … a poetic and humorous time travelling adventure into the splintered world of Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimers, an incurable disease, with almost one million people affected in the UK, steals our memories, our personalities, and eventually takes away our lives: the brain forgets how to breathe, swallow, pump blood. The human brain is the most complex and unbelievable piece of equipment but it is ephemeral; it wasn’t designed to last forever.
I Have Lost Myself … is the new project from Mischievous Theatre,
with humour, text, sound, images, puppetry and action! A series of
half or wholly forgotten tales, told from the erratic memory of an
unreliable narrator, which takes us on a time twisting journey
through a diseased brain, a battered suitcase, a sketchy biography
of a disease and recalls events that never happened.
An image from a work-in-progress performance of I Have Lost Myself … at Theatre Royal Margate
I Have Lost Myself … is a partial biography of Alzheimer’s disease. Beginning with Alois Alzheimer’s first contact with Auguste Deter, a German woman of fifty-one years of age, who showed all of the symptoms of senile dementia. Then following her death, dissecting her brain and finding the plaques and tangles that are now associated with the disease which bears his name. And finishing with; where are we now? New drugs, medical breakthroughs, detection, care giving, treatment, and prevention; are we finding a cure?
Frau Auguste Deter
I Have Lost Myself … also has a rough guide to the brain itself, how it works, what does it do, where does it store memories, how does it retrieve those memories and how does the disease disrupt these systems to render the
brain eventually useless. It does all of this with compassion and a large dose of humour.
I Have Lost Myself … is inspired by my mother who was affected by Alzheimer’s disease during the last few years of her life.
Clive Holland