Life on a Loop is a monologue directed by Jesse Peach recounting the events a care worker has experienced and observed at her workplace.
Delivered at a vivace tempo, writer and performer Ellie Smith, takes on the mantle of slaloming through a wide range of accents as she mimics the stationed residents and fleeting visitors of a retirement home.
It is alleged to have derived from her experiences as a singer at such establishments.
This is a one room, one act, one cast member show of approximately 75 minutes that showcases the versatility of a gleefully apt 75-year-old.
Yes, Ellie Smith is 75 years old and competently portrays multiple variants of those of a similar age from any continent and of any gender all with the vitality of somebody approximately half her age.
This is no mistake. She is not an old performer playing old people in a youthful way. She is an old performer playing a younger care worker re-enacting the stories she’s witnessed from being around people twice her age.
Put more simply, Ellie Smith acts half her age!
She additionally had only half a stage to play within. The aesthetic contained an unlit left and right quarter with a centralised cube frame entirely bound with LED fairy lights that sporadically switched between white and a multi-coloured mix.
The performance strictly remained within the confines of this faceless cube which was sparsely dressed with five reasonably typical, though not uniform, care home chairs, one a wheelchair, and each accompanied with items such as a teddy bear, blankets, and cushions, collectively arranged on the floor for the convenience of the viewer in a number-five-dice-face pattern.
Sometimes art needs confines to home in on its core and deliver its intent or message in its purest form. It is difficult to believe that this was the thought process here. It seems more likely that the budget restricted the art.
Would this play have been more effective with two acts with only one eliciting laughter at the characterisation, whilst the other smacked you with the shame of finding the distress of repeating monotony funny?
Would the message have been delivered more coherently with a larger cast of care workers and caterers literally living on a loop with the routine phrases and actions they bring to their workplace to a group of residents whose deeply unsettling struggles are numbingly cyclical?
Are the confused, afraid and frustrated blunt phrases of mentally deteriorating people truly empathised with through comedy?
What about the contextual appropriateness of comedy as a tool to convey a lack of dignity?
The comedy is perhaps intended to make this play palatable. In this regard, Ellie’s characterisation is sharp, engaging and animated. She also peppers her audience rapport with
short anecdotes prodding them for laughs in a very similar way to stand-up comedy, but the subject matter is not comedy.
Furthermore, it is a nuanced conversation with no universally accurate summary like, isn’t it awful that we lock up our parents against their will in terrible places called care homes.
This wouldn’t resonate, but a conversation alone is only a starter to a message.
None of the stage craft significantly added any further ingredients. The lighting seemed randomly shifting and not pertinent to specific moments. The spots were simplistic. The props were minimally touched.
The musical opening did allude to a possible sense of drowning with Doris Day’s Que Sera, Sera given an underwater effect. The framing cube may also have been suggesting a type of entrapment, but ultimately these nods were not reinforced or expanded enough to have been evocative.
The depth of this discourse is no more than fleetingly glanced at a few times and largely masked.
One segment that most stood out as poignant surrounded the concept of how saying goodbye is stolen from those suffering with dementia. Effectively, that the conversation is irrelevant when possible and impossible when relevant.
This is not the only moment Ellie connected with the audience with a tear glazed steely sincerity, but it was the most pertinent.
Shortly after this vignette, which is a descriptor applicable to each and all the passing moments of this production, we were transported into another one.
Whether it was funny or serious was arbitrary as the direction of any characterisation shift was not associated with any development – neither chronological nor emotionally building. These vignettes were mostly partitioned by audio cues, off stage recorded announcements or small blocking shifts.
The common element was that Ellie vacillated through them at such breakneck speed that pause for digestion was not possible.
If you wandered, you could be lost and uncertain whom you were now listening to – the care worker, a character she is impersonating or even a character within a character within a character – yes this occurs.
This production is a showcase of skill with little provocation. Had we witnessed an awkward conversation between a relative and a resident for 15 heated minutes followed by the resident leaving and the remainder of the play being an hour of silent rocking with confused mumbling, forlorn gazing out a window or angry talking to a mirror, we’d probably find it unbearable, yet it’d literally be a poxy little hour and a half of a theatre goers unmanageable time – nothing compared to the days, months and years the subjects endure.
Of course, that’d be an entirely different play. In fairness, that is not what this one has been made to be. Despite what the promotional material infers, this is a small scale and little-known production still in its infancy.
It has not been on a wild sell out London tour. It does not need to generate FOMO more than its players, like many artists, need support to keep sharpening their craft.
It was originally performed at the Union Theatre, Southwalk, London, in November 2024 for a couple of days and played again at the Golden Goose Theatre, Camberwell, London, in September 2025 for a few more days.
Now it’s here in Auckland. Give it some time. It received a partial standing ovation last night!
If you want to see the versatility of Ellie Smith, Life on a Loop is the weekend’s ticket for you.
If you truly want to contemplate the conversation very lightly touched upon within it, volunteer an hour of conversation to your local care home during their afternoon break and listen to someone who never has visits from their family – they’re always present and genuinely live the Life on a Loop this play never quite presents.
Even better: go to both.
Life on a Loop opened in Auckland’s Q Theatre last night where its scheduled run continues daily until Sunday, November 16th, with an added matinee on the last day.
Giles Wynn
