After four decades together, Jennifer Ward-Lealand and Michael Hurst are one of New Zealand theatre’s most enduring love stories. Joanna Wane looks at why playing a married couple in their latest project, In Other Words, cuts so close to home.
Memories tend to rewrite history with the creep of time. But Michael Hurst and Jennifer Ward-Lealand both remember exactly the same moment when that first bolt of lightning struck.
The scene is Kafka’s The Trial, the Steven Berkoff version. Their characters, who become lovers, are facing the audience when the door frames they’re standing in suddenly wheel so they confront each other face to face.
“It’s a significant moment [in the play],” says Hurst. “Well, it really was a significant moment for us. I got the full kipping.”
Hurst was 25. Ward-Lealand was 20. Both were in relationships at the time. More than four decades later, they have two adult sons and remain one of the most legendary couples on the New Zealand theatre scene.
Life doesn’t always imitate art: the last time they portrayed husband and wife, in 2005, Hurst’s character fell in love with a goat. It did not end well.
When they step on to the stage next month as Jane and Arthur — a couple in late middle age who collided (literally) in their 20s, as Hurst and Ward-Lealand did — it’ll cut much more closely to home.
In Other Words, by UK playwright Matthew Seager, is the sweet, funny, heartbreaking story of love and loss told in a series of flashbacks as Arthur slowly unravels with Alzheimer’s disease.
The title is drawn from the lyrics of Fly Me to the Moon, one of Frank Sinatra’s most famous songs. A recurring motif, it represents the transformative power of music to draw people back into themselves as they slip anchor and start to drift.
Hurst, a man who inhabits his emotions close to the surface, found himself tearing up at the first read-through. Not out of reflected self-pity for Arthur, although he admits the spectre of dementia is something he fears, but from grief at the thought of what it would mean for Ward-Lealand to become his caregiver.
“Look, I get terrified when I forget people’s names. And I forget people’s names all the time,” he says. “Rosie [producer Callum Brodie’s wife] had to give me a box of tissues.
“This is a beautiful, uplifting play, but when I imagined us doing that scene where Arthur doesn’t recognise Jane, I thought, ‘Holy s***, if I was watching that, I would be very moved’.”
Some 70,000 New Zealanders have Alzheimer’s or one of the other less common forms of dementia, a neurological disorder that leads to a gradual but inexorable cognitive decline.
By 2050, those numbers are expected to more than double, largely due to our longer life expectancy. While there’s a small but significant genetic component, the single biggest risk factor for developing dementia is age.
It’s a confronting prospect, especially for anyone who’s had personal experience of supporting someone through the tough final stages. As well as memory loss, behavioural changes can make people act completely out of character — sometimes violently.
“If you’re lucky, it doesn’t get to you until after 80,” says Ward-Lealand, who has close friends with parents affected by dementia. “But saying that, I’ve been hearing in the last couple of weeks of at least three or four people dealing with it anywhere from their mid-40s.
“It must be really difficult [for the person who has dementia] when you’re still cognisant enough to know that something is happening to you. But then losing the person you married, as Jane does, and being left with only snippets of them … there’s a lot of grief in that.”
First produced in 2017, In Other Words was revived in London last year and went on to tour the UK. A French adaptation, Oublie Moi (Forget Me) won four Moliere Awards, including Best Play, and is being made into a feature film.
Hurst and Ward-Lealand, who is also an accredited intimacy co-ordinator, have performed together numerous times, most recently in last year’s King Lear. This tender, bittersweet encounter will be their first two-hander, where they alone carry the play.
They’ve also come on board as co-directors in collaboration with Figment Production’s Callum Brodie, who’s English and a close friend of the playwright. When he picked up the script, he immediately visualised Hurst and Ward-Lealand in the roles.
“It’s going to be so much fun because there’s such a shorthand between them and as an actual married couple, of course there’ll be parallels,” he says. “Just imagine how much more meaning and connection it will add to this piece.”
Seager was in his last year at university in Leeds when he spent 10 weeks in a care home facilitating sensory stimulation workshops with residents living with dementia. At the end of each session, they’d put on some music.
In the play’s foreword, he describes the experience as profoundly moving. “Some residents who seemed completely cognitively unaware, distressed and unable to communicate coherently would stand and sing every word to a song they recognised from their childhood or young adult life.
“The resulting transformation in their mood or ability to remember and communicate was often astounding. It was equally both heartbreaking and beautiful, and resonated with me as a story that needed to be told.”
Music has played a powerful part in the lives of Ward-Lealand and Hurst, too — although it’s a running joke between them that, like Arthur, he really shouldn’t try to sing.
Hurst grew up in the UK where his father, a glass cutter by trade, played music and sang in a band. As a kid, Hurst earned 40¢ a week in pocket money for transcribing song lyrics by listening to records on repeat, a process that has (for better or worse) imprinted dozens of old country and western tunes indelibly on to his memory.
“She’s got a heart as warm as an icecream cone, she thinks I want her to come back home, but I’m gonna give her a good leaving alone,” he sings, grinning as Ward-Lealand rolls her eyes. “That kind of thing.”
A former member of The Front Lawn trio, Ward-Lealand toured her Marlene Dietrich cabaret show Falling in Love Again for 17 years and has always had the more eclectic musical taste, alongside their shared love of Brecht and the likes of Stephen Sondheim musicals.
On one of their first dates, in 1983, she took Hurst to see a punk rock band she loved, The Gordons. He remembers it sounded like a screaming jet engine. Four decades later, he still winces at the thought.
Music is a powerful force, says Ward-Lealand, evoking memories woven into the fabric of human relationships. “It’s like a lamp being held up in the dark to bring you back to being you.
“To have those moments of reconnection, however fleeting, when suddenly someone’s parent recognises them again and says their name. ‘There’s Mum, she sees me’. Or ‘There’s Dad’. I mean, how beautiful is that?”
For people who have been diagnosed with dementia, losing a sense of self is one of their greatest fears, says Lynette Tippett, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Auckland and director of the national network of Dementia Prevention Research Clinics.
Though it will inevitably become difficult to directly access the memories that help define them, this happens much more slowly than you might think. Research Tippett’s been involved in shows they still feel the same at the core — “the same person looking out through their eyes” — equally as often, if not more often, than people who don’t have dementia.
“Maybe that’s because they become less able to reflect on all the ways they’ve changed,” she acknowledges. “But that kind of internal sense of who they are remains strong for a long time and something like music that was part of their earlier life has a way of tapping into that.”
It’s not just listening to music that can trigger memories. Tippett has seen the power of song in action, too, at a support group for people with dementia and their caregivers that’s run from a kaupapa Māori perspective and includes the singing of waiata.
“A lot of emotions are stored alongside our musical memories,” she says. “So if people hear songs from their 20s, it takes them back to how they were feeling in that time. It can be a really positive shared remembering and re-experiencing, which I think helps maintain that sense of ‘I am still in here’.”
Tippett is just back from Philadelphia where she attended the 2024 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, the world’s largest gathering dedicated to advancing dementia science. She’s not the kind of person who uses words like “game-changer” lightly, but there was a real buzz at the conference.
A newly approved anti-amyloid therapy that fights Alzheimer’s by clearing plaques in the brain has been shown to modify the disease and slow the rate of decline. “We don’t know if that is going to be maintained over time, but there hasn’t been anything before that’s altered the trajectory, so it’s a huge step forward.”
The infusion therapy has some potentially dangerous side effects and patients need to be regularly monitored via MRI scans, something we simply don’t have the resources for in New Zealand. So, although this is a biological breakthrough, it won’t be available here any time soon.
Other big updates at the conference were on a new generation of blood tests targeting specific biomarkers that can pinpoint patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s with up to 90% accuracy. Identifying the presence of sticky amyloid plaques and tangled fibres called tau in the brain — hallmarks of the disease — requires a costly PET scan.
Tippett’s dementia prevention research clinics are looking to establish parameters suitable for the New Zealand population (the cut-off point for what’s considered a positive result) and to develop guidelines on how the test might be used.
Early diagnosis helps people access support services, for example. However, although the presence of amyloid in the brain is a key component of Alzheimer’s (but not other forms of dementia), not everyone who has amyloid will go on to develop the disease.
“You’re certainly at higher risk, but without the symptoms it’s not a diagnosis of whether you’ll get dementia, so there are a lot of ethical issues to weigh up about making something like that available,” she says.
“People might think they want to know, but finding out [that something may happen in the future] can be very destructive. If there was something we could do to make a difference to the outcome, that would be a different matter.”
While the end stages of the disease are certainly challenging, there’s a lot of good living to be done with dementia, says Tippett, and plenty that can be done to lower the odds of developing it in the first place.
A Lancet review released this month identifies 14 key modifiable risk factors, adding vision loss and high cholesterol to the list of known red flags such as smoking, traumatic brain injury and lower education levels. The authors say addressing all these risks could prevent or delay 45% of dementia cases worldwide.
Another new study, published in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, links a lack of purpose and personal growth to the development of mild cognitive impairment, a frequent precursor of dementia.
Both Ward-Lealand and Hurst keep their brains fired by continuing to take on challenging projects, as directors and actors. Hurst made a conscious decision some time ago not to be defeated by the fear of forgetting his lines. Learning a script, says Ward-Lealand, is like holding an entire book in your head.
For all its poignancy, they see In Other Words as a play filled with warmth and humour. As Jane and Arthur move back and forth through the decades, their shared experience of life and enduring love fills a pool of goodwill they draw on to face whatever may lie ahead. ‘Yeah, goodwill is a perfect word for it,” says Ward-Lealand. “And we have a tonne of that.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning feature writer on the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
The digitally savvy director’s fixed-perspective experiment takes us back to the future.