Over the past year — working at the intersection of St George’s medical school, the NHS environment, and my continuing bioinformatics research — I’ve found myself circling one question:

What remains of us when memory falters, and who carries the fragments we lose?

This question has become the seed of a new performance work: a play about Alzheimer’s, care, and the fragile rituals that preserve personhood when recognition fades. It is a project shaped equally by clinical observation, by the literature of Sebastian Barry, Sophocles, and contemporary Irish theatre, and by my own interest in how identity is both recorded and forgotten inside healthcare settings.

🌫️ A woman in a room that’s about to disappear

The piece centres on a single character — a woman working in the soon-to-close wing of a care home. The new building is opening at dawn. The old room she is sitting in is due to be sealed off, repurposed, or demolished.

The play begins not with big pronouncements, but with small, recognisable tasks:

finding a mug, adjusting a badge that keeps flipping backwards, wiping the dust from a radiator. These gestures open into a wider meditation on memory, loss, and the invisible labour of care.

A few teaser lines:

“There’s a room in every building that collects what’s left behind…

badges, mugs, forms without names, coats with elbows still remembered.”

and

“Some days you think the work is the tasks.

But it isn’t.

It’s the gathering — the turning forward —

the arrangement of what was nearly forgotten.”

These fragments belong to a longer monologue that will form the heart of the play. They sit somewhere between testimony, ritual, and quiet rebellion — a refusal to let small lives be mislaid.

🌱 Why this, and why now?

At St George’s, my studies took me deep into Alzheimer’s pathways, memory sciences, and the lived practicalities of dementia care. I also worked alongside clinical teams who confront, daily, the tension between documentation and personhood — between what the chart records and what a human presence communicates.

That proximity has shaped this work profoundly.

I don’t dramatise clinical details — the ethics matter too much — but the emotional architecture of the setting comes directly from it.

There is also something timely about this moment in theatre: with a new Irish play on memory at the National and a modern Antigone arriving soon, audiences seem ready to revisit stories of care, grief, and moral duty through fresh, unsentimental eyes.

🤲 A community chorus

As part of this project, I’ll be inviting carers, HCAs, cleaners, night-shift workers, nurses, and anyone who has ever looked after someone to contribute short, anonymous lines to form a gentle “carers’ chorus” at the end of the play.

Not heavy stories — just everyday truths:

the object you always carry the sound that tells you someone needs you the mug nobody can ever find the ritual that steadies you before a shift

This chorus will appear as a small, collective benediction — a reminder that identity is held not just by the self, but by community.

If you’d like to contribute, I’ll be sharing a link here soon.

🔍 Honouring care, honouring personhood

The play asks:

How do we honour lives whose memories have become scattered?

Where do we place the stories that can no longer place themselves?

It is not a sentimental piece.

It is not a tragedy.

It is, more than anything, an act of witnessing.

In the coming months, I’ll share updates, rehearsal notes, and open calls for participation. My hope is that this becomes a work shaped not only by research and imagination, but by the real textures and voices of those who live close to memory’s edge — professionally or personally.

More soon.

🌟)#Alzheimers #Dementia #NewWriting #TheatreMaking #CareWork #NHSVoices #CreativeHealth #StGeorgesUniversity #MedicalHumanities #Neurodiversity #Personhood #MemoryLoss #DramaInDevelopment #BioinformaticsMeetsTheatre #DustRituals #OnePersonShow #CareHomeStories #ArtsAndHealth #WellcomeTrust #TheStage #IrishTheatre #Antigone #SebastianBarry