Love, death and age; masks, dance but no words. That’s Theatre Ad Infinitum’s highly praised ‘Translunar Paradise’. Steve Wright holds his tongue.

There’s so much the body can and does say, but we seldom realise this.” The speaker, George Mann of rising UK physical theatre troupe Theatre Ad Infinitum, knows a thing or two about using the human body to tell a story. For one thing, George and fellow TAD founder Nir Paldi both trained at Paris’s renowned Jacques Lecoq school for physical theatre, mime and movement. Putting this training into practice, TAD’s first two productions were one-man/woman shows that told complex stories through movement. Their third piece adds masked theatre into the mix – and is undoubtedly their most complex and emotional outing yet.

‘Translunar Paradise’ tells the tale of William, an old man who, after the death of his beloved wife, escapes from his grief into a paradise of fantasy and past memories. Returning from beyond the grave, Rose revisits her widowed companion to perform one last act of love: to help him let go. The show is told entirely without words, instead using movement, haunting music and masks. Performer/director Mann and Deborah Pugh play young lovers and also, thanks to those masks, their 80-year-old counterparts.

The masks come on and off as the story shifts back and forth in time from the couple’s dance-led courtship through middle age to old age: and through it all, musician Kim Heron traverses the stage, playing the accordion, singing, and – notes one reviewer – “serving as a sort of omniscient facilitator, nudging this story of a happy, lasting marriage towards its inevitable conclusion”.

The play won much acclaim at last year’s Edinburgh Festival (where it reduced Venue’s stony-hearted outgoing editor to tears): as The Guardian’s reviewer put it, “this is a show about loss and bereavement that is as much about mourning your own lost self as about the grief at the death of a long-term partner.”

“It’s about many things: love, shared memory and loss and a relationship spanning 60 years,” Mann reflects. “William has recently lost his wife and instead of moving on he gets lost in past memories. His wife Rose, seeing he is unable to let go, stays with him as a ghost and helps him come to terms with his loss. The story follows William and Rose as they share wonderful memories together – from their courting days in the 40s right through to their last days together. It’s a real rich tapestry of a life shared.

“It’s about moving on and how, in order to move on, we have to come to terms with and be truly happy with the past. And it’s also about the gap between young and old. Age, like a mask, can obscure the fact a person was once young. We work without words, conveying this story through the body and music. The audience will be immersed in feeling, sensations and movements.”

It’s been a red-letter year for Theatre Ad Infinitum, who have also toured their award-winning one-woman show ‘The Big Smoke’ (an account of a promising young artist’s descent into depression), and taken their extraordinary ‘Odyssey’ (in which Mann played the legendary Greek warrior and peregrinator – plus all of the characters, human, godly and bestial, who confront him) to an international audience. We saw the latter show at the Ustinov last year, and were much impressed: “Mann is ‘Odyssey’’s human cast, its assorted divine meddlers, its monsters, its swine and all of the elements. Stripped-down storytelling… a creditable conjuring trick.”

But back to ‘Translunar…’ – which, says Mann, confounds expectations on a few levels. “For one thing, we break the traditional ‘mould’ of combining masks with puppetry: our masks [created by one Victoria Beaton – who is otherwise employed at Madame Tussauds, no less] are handheld. Using masks helps to reveal both our younger and older selves, transporting us back and forth in time. It’s also one of very few plays to attempt to communicate complex themes and emotional content without text.”

The play’s title comes from WB Yeats’s poem ‘The Tower’ (“That being dead, we rise/Dream and so create/Translunar paradise”). “I wanted to take Yeats’s character – a man embittered by loss and old age – and also myself on a journey that would help him to look more positively at life after death.

“This paradox in people fascinates me. We can be both strong and weak at the same time, just as we can laugh and cry simultaneously, or even love and hate. I think this is represented by the masks in our piece – you can see the old man, but you can also see the young man wearing it – youth and old age sitting side by side, co-existing in the same space.”

Mann has personal experience to bring to the subject – and a surprising take on death. “My experiences with death and grief have taught me that death is very much a part of life, and – though extremely difficult to deal with – is also a wonderful gift. My father was diagnosed with cancer five years ago and died in January this year. Following his diagnosis with lung cancer and his treatment, I found myself in and out of something like premature grief. But paradoxically, alongside this feeling, I also realized that each of day of that five-year period was another day in which my father was still living; an opportunity to appreciate our relationship, sort out our differences, and to say goodbye.”

TRANSLUNAR PARADISE WAS AT BRISTOL OLD VIC STUDIO FROM TUE 7-SAT 11 FEB. FFI: WWW.BRISTOLOLDVIC.ORG.UK

Copyright Steve Wright 2012; pics copyright Alex Brenner.