MEMORIES and the absence of memories is the theme of a new play opening at Holybourne Theatre next week.

Written by resident Keith Outterside, and based on personal experiences, the play explores the challenges of dementia and reflections back to the swinging Sixties.

The story follows Mary who, with the onset of Alzheimer’s, has moved to a retirement home where she has to deal each day with her cantankerous fellow residents. While Mary’s memories of the recent past have faded, her long-term memories are still very strong. In particular, her memories of the 1967 phenomenon that was the Summer of Love. A time when hippies and young people around the world embraced alternative lifestyles.

In 1967 Mary fell, enduringly and eternally, in love with the man with whom she planned to grow old with. However, Mary’s life is thrown into disarray when she falls pregnant and faces the future as a single mum. When acid house became the next youth subculture in 1989, she witnesses things from a very different perspective as mother to Michelle.

Imagine, Me and You, with its gentle humour, recounts how that summer, and the second Summer of Love in 1989, has affected Mary across the decades. Music from Scott McKenzie, the Mamas and Papas, Deep Purple, the Turtles and the Rolling Stones provides a perfect, evocative Sixties soundtrack to Mary’s story.

Curtain up is at 8pm next Thursday, June 16.

Tickets, priced £7.50, are available from Waterstone’s bookshop on Alton High Street or online at holybouretheatre.co.uk, and 25 per cent of the price of each ticket will be donated to The Alzheimer’s Society.