The Fall

(originally published in Third Lives Matters magazine, summer issue)

Britain’s National Youth Theatre celebrated its 60th birthday by staging a hard-hitting play about the way young people see their relationships with old people, ageing and their own futures. James Perrett, 27, went to see it for TAM 

“Do you think it’s that bad, being that old?”  

“I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.” 

What is your life worth? Not existentially, but in cold, hard cash? 

That is the question throughout the three subplots of James Fritz’s The Fall, recently performed by the National Youth Theatre at Southwark Playhouse in London. 

Each story questioned the balance between the value of an older person’s life and that of the young people around them. 

How much can the younger generation truly empathise with the older, when the former feels dispossessed and views the latter as financially secure? 

The first: two young lovers break into a 92-year old’s house to find him semi-conscious, having taken an overdose. The ethical question: do they leave him to die “the way he wanted” or do they call an ambulance, risking their own arrest? 

They already resent the man for living in "house number three" of the Monopoly board they will never get on. The dissonance between their ages and his is clear in their attitudes towards “pills and shit like that keeping us alive too long.” 

Is leaving him to die kind, or self-serving? 

The second: a tale of getting old through the eyes of those around you. 

We watch a couple's life grow until they are "48 and still renting", struggling to raise a teenager and fractured with disagreement about accepting the offer of the husband's mother, Jean, to sell her house and give them the money. In the end, the husband refuses, and Jean has to die before she can help her family. 

We never see the slowly ailing Jean; she's the abstract concept of "getting old" that lingers in the minds of the young. 

The disgraceful lack of help is highlighted: a government-funded carer has 15 minutes to get to the house, finish and leave. This may be the only human contact an old person has for the entire day. "How can there be no help?" the wife asks, as we ask it too. 

The third: a dystopian but realistic vision of current under-25s as over-95s, in a home offering euthanasia as a means to provide financial security for their families. 

This may be a dramatic knee-jerk solution to our very real housing problem and to the perception that there are “too many” old people. But one only has to think about it to wonder what the consequences of the dearth of affordable housing will be 70 years from now as governments continue to ignore it. 

Might being priced out of this world be 2088's version of the “social cleansing” that is today seeing people priced out of their homes as private replaces social housing in cities all over the UK?