By James Hadley in London

Until recently I had always thought children were the hardest audience for theatre. Try performing to a room full of older people living with dementia. A short attention span is one thing, but how do you connect as a performer with someone who won't even make eye contact?By James Hadley in London

Until recently I had always thought children were the hardest audience for theatre. Try performing to a room full of older people living with dementia. A short attention span is one thing, but how do you connect as a performer with someone who won't even make eye contact?I recently went to a well resourced rest home for older people in the Hampstead neighbourhood of London, just down the road from the famous Central School of Speech and Drama. On the day in question, this was where a theatre company called Ladder to the Moon was performing as part of a lengthy tour around rest homes in Greater London.

From chatting to the group's artistic director, Chris Gage, I learnt that the company started out offering theatre to patients within hospitals, then grew more specialised as the challenge of how to connect with individuals experiencing dementia took over much of their creative aims.

They've developed an interactive theatre approach which they call 'connective theatre'. It's best explained by telling you what I witnessed. I was sitting at the edge of a large domestic lounge, filled with armchairs around the walls, and in every armchair was an older person. These individuals varied in their abilities to interact; some were lively conversationalists with a twinkle in their eye, others sat slumped in their chair with their head nodding forwards, perhaps not even awake. Several visitors of these residents were also present, plus a handful of carers. Into this environment an actor entered, and started to decorate the space.

They told residents on an individual basis that they were preparing the space for the arrival of the King, gradually engaging the residents in a sense of anticipation. The second time this performer would speak to any particular individual, she would feed them a little more information about who she was (a visitor to the court), and gently infer that perhaps they were a courtier, asking their name. Should they respond with their own name, the performer would decorate it with a title - Duke Charlie, or Lady Ethel - or the more lively might offer a made up character name. The key thing was that suggestions were made very gently in the interactions, and no awareness of a wider context than the performer talking directly to the individual was necessary to follow things. Eventually a second actor entered and began a similar process, introducing himself as a new character, and feeding the residents a bit more backstory. The performance was loosely based around Shakespeare's 'The Winter's Tale', but in a much simplified form.

The most responsive residents were endowed as characters within the story, and eventually either given props to hold or asked for their opinions on a developing situation. This led to some comedy when a lovely older lady endowed as a queen was then inferred to have been unfaithful to her king. The older gentleman playing the king, when asked how he felt about his wife being unfaithful, pointed to the lady in question and said 'But that's not my wife!' Naturally the actors played off this offer, interpreting it as the king deciding to completely reject his wife (which fits the plot rather nicely).

The development of the story was very gently suggested with successive questioning and prompting of the various residents by the actors. They were constantly interacting with the residents, giving them costume accessories or props to further engage them in the story. At several points, the opportunity to insert a song was used to engage some of the less responsive residents - an actor came over to an older woman who seemed almost to be sleeping and sang softly by her ear, as she caressed her hand. So even if she had not been following anything else that was going on, she had been engaged with in a creative way on some level.

I couldn't claim that the performing was of any subtlety or detail, but that wasn't the point. Neither was this an adaptation of Shakespeare's play that captured more than some plot elements and mentioned the main characters, sometimes in ways that seemed divorced from meaningful context. But what impressed me was that this company had taken such an extremely hard to reach audience and found ways to get over the barriers in order for them to engage with a theatre performance. On whatever level the residents had understood the performance, they had almost all been aware of an atmosphere of celebration being created in the room, and some had been prompted to smiles and laughter by the interaction. It would have been so easy to just say 'this group of people are too hard to connect with in a meaningful way', but this company has refused to give up on the possibility of engaging their audiences in theatre. It has to be one of the most brave and admirable theatrical endeavours I've witnessed.

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Feel free to get in touch with any questions (or if you're planning a London visit and want some theatre recommendations) to jamesstuarthadley@gmail.com

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26/01/09