Love, memory and the music that brings us home

There is a moment at the beginning of many great love stories when everything changes. For Arthur and Jane, in Matthew Seager’s In Other Words, that moment is known simply as “the incident”.

Opening at Koorliny Arts Centre this May, In Other Words by Matthew Seager is an intimate, humorous and deeply moving love story about Arthur and Jane, played by Grant Malcolm and Natalie Burbage, under the direction of Geoffrey Leeder. Set against the timeless music of Frank Sinatra, the 75 minute play traces the couple’s life together from its funny, imperfect beginnings to the profound challenges of Alzheimer’s disease, offering a tender reflection on memory, devotion and the power of music to reconnect us with the people and moments we hold dear.

Arthur remembers it one way. Jane, quite firmly, remembers it another.

For Grant Malcolm, who plays Arthur in Koorliny Arts Centre’s upcoming production, that difference says almost everything about the man he is bringing to life.

“The truth is Arthur wasn’t watching where he was going and ploughed into a stranger hard enough for her to wear her own glass of red wine,” Grant says. “The version he tells, and keeps telling, is that this was somehow the opening move of a grand romantic plan.”

That, he says, is where Arthur lives. Not in a lie exactly, but in the warm, human space between what happened and what we need it to mean.

“He’s a man who has spent decades editing his own life into a slightly better story,” Grant says. “The charm of him is that he mostly gets away with it because the edits are generous and funny and usually flatter Jane more than himself.”

In In Other Words, audiences are invited into the beginning of Arthur and Jane’s relationship, discovering how they met, fell in love and built a life together. Set to the timeless music of Frank Sinatra, the play follows the small, familiar, intimate moments that shape a shared life before that life takes an unexpected turn with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. The media pack describes the show as an intimate, humorous and deeply moving love story that explores the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, with warmth, sensitivity and gentle humour.

For Grant, Arthur’s habit of reshaping the past begins as comedy, but grows into something much more fragile.

“It’s also, I think, a small act of self-protection that becomes something else as the play goes on,” he says. “When memory starts to fail, the habit of polishing the past into shape stops being charm and starts being survival. The same instinct that turned a clumsy collision into a meet-cute is the instinct trying to hold the marriage together when the facts won’t cooperate.”

The result is a role that demands absolute belief.

 

“Playing him, you have to commit absolutely to the romantic version,” Grant says. “Arthur isn’t just winking at the audience. He believes it. That’s what makes it funny, and eventually, what makes it break your heart.”

Opposite him is Natalie Burbage as Jane, a woman whose journey through love, partnership, memory and loss asks as much of the actor as it does of the audience. Natalie, whose biography notes more than 50 productions since her community theatre debut in 2009, says Jane is the kind of role performers hope to find. Her credits include Brassed Off, Escaped Alone, What If If Only, Chalkface, Things I Know to be True, Ghosts, Mamma Mia, The Boy from Oz, Steel Magnolias and The 39 Steps.

“For me, approaching a new role is about connecting with a character in some way and walking in their shoes, feeling empathy,” Natalie says. “The role of Jane is a gift to any actor because of the range of emotions required.”

It is the writing, she says, that allows those emotions to unfold with such honesty.

“Matthew Seager’s writing is beautifully poignant, with the dialogue between characters believable,” she says. “The monologues have the feel of an intimate chat, allowing the audience to share the emotional journey and become invested in the characters’ lives.”

That intimacy is central to the power of In Other Words. At approximately 75 minutes, the production does not need spectacle to make its impact. It relies instead on two people, a lifetime of feeling and the quiet courage of speaking openly about dementia.

“We all bring our own life experiences along to the theatre, which colour our interpretations, whether we’re onstage or off,” Natalie says. “We are storytellers, and it is a privilege to help tell this particular story.”

That sense of privilege extends beyond the stage. Natalie has dedicated her performance to the families and carers of people living with dementia.

“My dedication is a way of saying, ‘I see you,’” she says.

She speaks with care about the often invisible burden carried by carers, the daily work, the emotional strain and the heartbreak of watching someone change.

“The daily struggles that carers go through assisting people who don’t necessarily recognise that they need help, or even if they do, won’t accept it, coupled with the heartbreak of watching the person they know gradually disappear, can be thankless, lonely, exhausting and frequently unnoticed,” she says.

Natalie hopes those who have experienced dementia in their own families, or who are caring for someone now, will find something recognisable in Jane’s experience.

“Every person’s experience with dementia is different, but speaking about it openly, or watching a theatre performance, may help people to feel less isolated,” she says.

That connection with the wider community is part of the production itself. Koorliny Arts Centre’s media pack notes that the season is presented in partnership with Forget-Me-Not Memory Café, with information available at every performance for those affected by dementia.

“I think Geoffrey’s initiative of having people from The Memory Café at the theatre following performances is wonderful,” Natalie says. “They will be there to provide resources and offer support for people attending.”

For director Geoffrey Leeder, In Other Words is a rare play because it refuses to sit neatly in one category. It is not simply a drama about Alzheimer’s disease, nor is it a comedy about a long marriage. It is both, because life is both.

“Matthew Seager, the author of In Other Words, has given us a well researched and sensitively written script to work with,” Geoffrey says. “For me, as a director, this is a perfect script. It’s not a comedy, it’s not a drama, and it’s a carefully crafted blend of both.”

That balance, he says, is already embedded in the writing.

“Mr Seager’s balanced text of the elements you mentioned has done the work for us,” he says.

Geoffrey brings a long history in community theatre to the production. His biography notes 38 years of involvement, beginning as an actor before moving into directing. His directorial debut was Melville Theatre Company’s The Importance of Being Earnest in 1999, followed by productions including Too Far to Walk, Butterflies Are Free, Emerald City, They’re Playing Our Song, Stepping Out, Away, The American Plan, Boys Life, Wonderful World, Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks and Red Silk. He has also served as Treasurer of the Independent Theatre Association, worked as a Finley Awards adjudicator and is a Life Member of the ITA.

After such a broad directing career, Geoffrey says he now finds himself drawn to simplicity.

He first encountered In Other Words while on holiday in New Zealand.

“When I entered the auditorium of a beautifully restored theatre in Christchurch and saw the set, I thought to myself, ‘oh no, if I like this I’ll have to do it’,” he says. “I didn’t like it, I loved it.”

The appeal was immediate.

“It has the two things I look for now in a play, a simple set and brilliant script,” Geoffrey says. “At this point in my theatre journey, simplicity is what I look for.”

That simplicity places focus exactly where it needs to be, on Arthur, Jane and the relationship that holds them together as memory begins to shift. One of the play’s emotional anchors is music, particularly Frank Sinatra’s version of “Fly Me To The Moon”.

“There are specific points in the play where Arthur and Jane’s love of music is highlighted,” Geoffrey says. “It’s ‘their’ song and becomes the one tune that will calm Arthur down when he is distressed. It’s then that the healing power of music, in particular this tune for this couple, is highlighted.”

For Grant, too, Sinatra becomes more than a soundtrack. In Arthur’s world, music is part of the man himself, a familiar thread still within reach when other parts of his life begin to slip.

“He’s not a condition,” Grant says. “He’s a man who happens to be losing his grip on the story he’s been telling about himself, and Frank Sinatra, mercifully, is still on his side.”

That distinction matters deeply to Grant. While he has performed in more than 100 productions across a wide variety of venues and styles, he says Arthur has brought a particular kind of exposure.

“Most of those hundred-odd shows give you somewhere to hide, an ensemble, a heightened style, a big set, a costume that does half the work,” he says. “In Other Words doesn’t. There are two people on stage and the audience is close enough to see you think or not, as is the case with someone living with Alzheimer’s.”

The role asks him to work against many of the instincts and tools actors usually rely on.

“What’s particular about Arthur is that the usual actor’s tools, pace, wit, timing, the ability to find the next word, are exactly the things the character is losing,” he says. “So you’re working with the instrument and against it at the same time. It’s the most exposed I think I’ve felt on stage.”

Grant’s own experience conducting performance workshops with youth at risk, frail aged people and people with disabilities has informed his understanding of Arthur, but not in a simplistic way.

“Those rooms taught me that dignity isn’t something you bestow on someone, it’s something you make space for,” he says.

That lesson has stayed with him.

“Working with frail aged participants in particular, you learn very quickly that a person experiencing cognitive decline is still entirely a person, with humour and irritation and vanity and tenderness intact, often sharper than you’d guess,” he says.

It is a point that sits at the heart of this production. Arthur is not a lesson. Jane is not merely a carer. They are people. They are funny, stubborn, loving, difficult, vulnerable and familiar.

“The danger with a role like Arthur is sentimentalising him into a symbol of the disease,” Grant says. “Those workshops are a useful inoculation against that.”

The intimacy of the play also depends on the bond between the two performers. Natalie and Grant have worked together before, appearing alongside one another in Ghosts at Melville Theatre Company. Grant’s biography also notes his excitement at working with Natalie again and at working with Geoffrey Leeder for the first time at Koorliny.

For Natalie, that existing connection has been invaluable.

“Grant is a generous and talented actor who has a gift of making people feel at ease in his company,” she says. “It has been a delight to work with him again.”

Trust, she says, is essential in a piece this personal.

“Because we know one another and have already formed a bond of trust, we are able to work together without awkwardness and know to check in on one another,” she says.

Both actors also understand the long rhythms of committed relationships in their own lives.

“We are both fortunate to have wonderfully supportive long-term spouses,” Natalie says. “So perhaps we each draw from our own individual experiences and find the common ground when portraying the complexity of Jane and Arthur’s relationship.”

Grant says working with Natalie again was one of the reasons he said yes to the production.

“After playing alongside her Mrs Alving at Melville I’d happily play opposite her in a phone book,” he says. “She has a quality on stage of being absolutely present and absolutely unsentimental at the same time, which is exactly what Jane needs.”

Working with Geoffrey has brought its own pleasure.

“I’ve known Geoff for mumble mumble years and somehow we’d never actually made a show together,” Grant says. “There’s a particular pleasure in finally being directed by an old friend. The shorthand is already there, so you skip past the polite phase and get straight to the useful arguments.”

Natalie describes the rehearsal room with equal warmth.

“The collaboration with these two remarkable people, for whom I have so much respect, has been joyful,” she says.

Her own recent work has included both acting and directing, including playing Lena in Escaped Alone and directing What If If Only, which won four awards at the 2025 ITA Robert Finley Awards, including Best One Act Play, Best Director of a One Act Play and Most Innovative Production.

But in In Other Words, she says her role is clear.

“Direction is about having the ability to see the production as a whole,” Natalie says. “We can suggest ideas, discuss and experiment, but ultimately, my place as an actor is to bring Geoffrey’s vision for the show to audiences.”

Geoffrey’s wider vision for theatre is also shaped by his belief in inclusion and recognition. His biography notes his passion for the inclusion of actors of diverse cultural heritage in mainstream community theatre productions, reflecting Australia’s multicultural society.

He traces part of that awareness to his experience acting with one of Perth’s Indian community theatre companies.

“It was a specific Indian story set in India which needed Anglo Saxon actors to play the British characters,” he says. “This introduced me to an untapped source of talented actors not seen before in mainstream Community Theatre.”

That experience led him to cast an Indian actor in two staged play readings in roles not specifically written for a culturally diverse performer.

“It worked,” he says.

With In Other Words, he sees a story that could speak across cultures because its central subject is universal.

“The subject of Alzheimer’s disease is universal,” Geoffrey says. “The playwright specifically has given consent to amend the location and cultural heritage of the actors if needed.”

For this production, however, Geoffrey knew exactly who he wanted after seeing the play in Christchurch.

“When I saw that production in Christchurch, I knew who I wanted for the roles,” he says. “Fortunately they agreed to do it.”

Now, with Grant Malcolm as Arthur, Natalie Burbage as Jane and Geoffrey Leeder directing, In Other Words comes to Koorliny Arts Centre as a story about memory, yes, but even more deeply, about love. The kind that survives awkward first meetings, repeated stories, private songs, difficult days and the terrifying uncertainty of losing what once seemed permanent.

Grant says Koorliny has been “a generous home for the piece”.

“It’s a strong room for intimate work,” he says. “A play this close to the bone needs a theatre that knows how to lean in.”

And perhaps that is what In Other Words asks of its audience too, to lean in. To listen. To laugh. To recognise the people they love, the stories they repeat, the songs that can take them back and the memories that still matter, even when they begin to fade.

See In Other Words at Koorliny Arts Centre

In Other Words by Matthew Seager plays at Koorliny Arts Centre, Theatre 1, from 15 to 23 May 2026, with performances at 2:00pm and 7:30pm. Tickets are $25 to $30. Bookings are available at koorliny.com.au or by phoning 9467 7118.

Book now to experience this intimate, humorous and deeply moving love story about Arthur, Jane, memory, music and the enduring strength of love.