On The One Hand

West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds/Touring

4 Stars

It's somehow fitting that The Paper Birds chose to celebrate their 10th anniversary with a meditation on the process of ageing.

A fragmented collage of the lives and experiences of five women, On The One Hand combines the company's hallmarks of physical theatre with meticulous research.

The characters are nameless and identified only by their age so that Teen (Hannah Lambsdown) anxiously applies to university while Sixty & Elderly (Illona Linthwaite) struggles with failing faculties.

Drawn from interviews with dozens of women from different backgrounds, the research is reflected in the conversational dialogue, from the "you see" verbal tic of Elderly to Forty (Tracey-Anne Liles), who plausibly juggles the multiple roles of mother, lecturer and a childless businesswoman with frazzled exasperation.

The constraints and expectations of the women's lives are emphasised by Fiammetta Horvat's set design, which places chairs and baths into a small split-level space.

The women squeeze between these objects, with a fridge freezer becoming the screen of a Skype conversation as Thirty (Kylie Walsh) goes travelling. Fifty, meanwhile, is squeezed out altogether. Heard only as an offstage voice, her ghostly presence represents the way in which the age group is ignored and unseen by society.

Despite the feminist angle the show is never dogmatic and it's both funny and poignant in its self-recognition. The parodies used to market the "cliptoe" - a new invention for pairing socks - are hilarious as Forty gives a stumbling market pitch and is then pushed into appearing on shopping channel QVC.

Yet there's an unbearably poignant moment too when Elderly speaks with her mother, whose presence is implied only by a walking stick hooked over the back of an empty chair.

Though let down somewhat by the physical theatre elements - the way in which characters repeatedly gesticulate behind the speaker distracts - the themes of passing time and the search for identity will resonate with just about any audience.

Runs at Live Theatre, Newcastle, from December 4-6. Box office: (0191) 232-1232.

Susan Darlington