While a media storm envelopes Theresa May’s U-turn on care provision, Michael Aitken’s staged version of Waiting for God suddenly finds greater relevance. Living in an imagined netherworld, the Bayview Retirement Home, Aitken’s principle protagonists, ex-accountant Tom Ballard and feisty feminist and former photojournalist Diana Trent might be just the sort to find themselves in the government’s crosshairs. The two form an unlikely alliance that provokes both surprise and self-examination in the young staff members at the institution.

Now nearly seventy himself, Aitken admits, in the programme notes, to being most like the character of Diana – with a ‘dark sense of humour, verbose, always seeing everything from the bleakest possible position.’ As the play develops, it becomes clear that it is Trent’s acerbic cri-de-coeur that gives the play its substance, while other parts exist mostly to frame these wonderfully noire utterances.

Nichola McAuliffe is a perfect Trent – at as much ease with her cantankerous nature as she was with her fleeting vulnerability. Her’s was the performance to savour while others sometimes dipped perilously close to pantomime. Written originally for TV in the 1990s, Aitken has upped the anti on Trent’s present-day expletives; McAuliffe can now happily yell out “Bollocks!” or “Bugger!” whereas only the quaint-sounding “Damn” and “Bloody” was acceptable on the small screen two decades ago.

Waiting for God serves to debunk a few preconceptions about the elderly, but principally that sex needn’t be missing from the menu. The love interest between Trent and her more conventional fellow ‘inmate’, affable Tom Ballard, played by Jeffrey Holland, is a little disjointed to begin with, but later develops into something much more tangible once she wakes up in his bed, having made the initial overtures the night before.  There will be an extraordinary, if chaotic, finale, in which he attempts to ‘do the right thing’.

Joanna Bending plays Diana’s forthright pregnant niece, Sarah Chase. There were question marks over a questionably shaped pregnancy ‘lump’ under her attire, but she should certainly be commended for her convincing yells during ‘childbirth’. The arrival of her baby would expose a new side to the normally irascible Diana.

On the simplest of stage sets – two sets of tables and chairs at either side, with a simple potted palm indicating some small degree of opulence, the incumbent Diana is ministered to by the clueless and simpering helper Jane Edwards (Emily Pithon) and care home manager Harvey Baines (Samuel Collings). A pity that these two were encouraged to over-act. Edwards’ squeaking, infantile delivery plus some clowning from Baines, undermined the play’s deeper, darker comedic moments.  Farce there was late in the story, but the writing and direction of this never matched the glorious heights of Diana’s invective.

Could Waiting for God represent the baby-boomers last gift to humanity? It certainly held two fingers to death and the expectation that one’s final years should pass uneventfully.    ★★★☆☆   Simon Bishop at Bath Theatre Royal on 23^rd May 2017

PHOTO CREDIT Geraint Lewis