Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Glenda Jackson, Helen Behan, Sophie Rundle, Liv Hill, Nell Williams, Mark Stanley, Neil Pendleton, Maggie Steed, Sam Hazeldine, Michelle Duncan, John-Paul Hurley, Tom Urie, Julia Hannan, Linda Hargreaves, Neil Pendleton, Tony Atherton, Anne-Marie Nabirve, Begonia Villalba, Nabs Aziz.
To gradually forget what has happened in your life is one of the great sources of unhappiness that anyone could arguably go through. To leave behind moments of love and tenderness, to fail to recall an event, to not recognise your child, to be powerless to get through the day without being capable of remembering the basics to be able to function, that is the greatest act of cruelty that the mind can play on a human being.
Andrea Gibb’s powerful adaptation of Emma Healey’s novel, Elizabeth Is Missing, is one of those rare moments of television that hits the viewer square in the emotional guts and leaves them feeling understanding the nature of the progressive disease Alzheimer’s and the viciousness of dementia. Directed by Aisling Walsh, the unfolding of Maud’s life and memory is given the space to fall apart, to show just deeply effecting the disease is when it comes to triggers and certain flashbacks, and as Glenda Jackson portrays with unnerving insight, just how painful it is to be reminded of the events which left you scarred and mentally wounded.
Memory becomes a stranger and personal history starts to fade, but it is the mystery created by those forgotten events that we often find solace, and in Elizabeth Is Missing it is the failure of recall of what happened to her friend that leads Maud to discover a much darker and disturbing secret.
It is a bad dream, the waking fog in which we walk through and one that Andrea Gibb frames with eloquence and feverish understanding and with tremendous performances by the aforementioned Glenda Jackson and Helen Behan, Elizabeth Is Missing becomes a journey of remembrance, the commemoration of the refusal to let the past die before solving the puzzle to which it has latched onto.
A poignant and outstanding drama, one that celebrates an actor such as Glenda Jackson with a performance that ranks amongst her very finest.
Ian D. Hall