How homelessness happens – a forensic play
Elaine Paton could never have imagined that she would join the growing number of older women experiencing homelessness. Not in a modern, privileged society. But in 2018, there she was. In 2020 Paton was provided with public housing during the pandemic and found herself isolated in a room, surrounded by the paraphernalia of her life. Searching through the boxes, she started to discover how she fell through the cracks.
Through The Cracks is a unique exposition of Paton’s story. In this interactive dramatisation, Paton plays the duel roles of herself and the fictional Detective Myfwany Tilly, an investigator assigned to find Paton when she goes missing.
Tilly works with the audience, exploring personal artefacts, rifling through diaries, examining photos, pinning clues to an evidence board, trying to piece together the puzzle of Elaine Paton’s unexplained disappearance.
Tilly is a gritty, hard-nosed, rough-edged, swearing, smoking Welsh detective, dragged out of retirement in her late sixties. Though she is a fictional character, she embodies Paton’s tenacity and determination to find answers.
The artefacts, the stories are real. Paton bares her life, her struggles with mental illness and homelessness with generous honesty in the hope that it may inform and help others.
“Older women are rarely represented in theatre. We are also the fastest growing cohort of homeless people, sleeping in cars… or worse,” says Paton. “My story could be any women’s story, it just happens to be mine.”
