Love - The Musical - TNT

Icelandic director and actor Gisli Orn Gardarsson first made a big impression over here with an aerial interpretation of that enduring tragedy of thwarted young love "Romeo and Juliet". Now he's turned his attention to the other end of the spectrum with this patchy tale of late-blossoming romance. Set in a care home where the residents (under the strict eye of a far too sexy nurse who insists on "no talking" after lights out) are all old, often frail and frequently mentally incapacitated, it celebrates the strength of long-lasting love and the power of unexpected geriatric amour.
Here, Peter, still sprightly, cossets the wife who can no longer speak to him whilst Dudley Sutton's Thomas, his brain addled by Alzheimer's, pees in public and dutifully swallows his medication. But it's the relationship between Anna Calder-Marshall's Margaret (dumped for the weekend by her son in the hope that she'll become a permanent resident) and Julian Curry's suddenly invigorated Neville (his dementia miraculously held at bay by her arrival) which seems to offer a last chance of future happiness.
Orn Gardarsson and his collaborators have woven snatches of familiar songs – from the Beatles to Bowie - into the fabric of the minimal plot (sometimes the words are spoken with poignant longing, sometimes sung in quavering voices by the professional cast and the amateur community choir of fellow residents). The result is intermittently touching, if too simplistically realised – but, whatever your age, this musical will be hard pushed to convince you that life really can begin when the years have rendered you too infirm to make use of your senior citizen bus pass.
Lyric Hammersmith, King Street, Hammersmith, W6. (0870-050 0511). Until June 21. £27-£13.