Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

On a video screen, snowy fabric — a bedsheet? A shroud? — flaps on a washing line. The screen crashes to the stage, revealing a glass pyramid with a revolving door. There’s a shiny bar, spindly see-through furniture, moody lighting: it’s like a chic minimalist watering-hole. The clientele are dressed for a night on the tiles — some in spangles or spiffy dress suits, others in leather — but there’s a ritualism about their shuffling procession that suggests that this is their very last blow-out. These are members of the Young@Heart Chorus, all aged 73 or over; and the night of revelry, reminiscence and regret takes place in a well-appointed waiting room between this world and the next.

The Massachusetts-based choir has built up an international cult following with its reinventions of rock’n’roll standards. This show, part of the Manchester International Festival, directed by the chorus founder Bob Cilman and Roy Faudree of the experimental No Theater, is the third in a trilogy. It lacks the immediacy of its more simply staged predecessor Road to Nowhere, seen in London in 2005. Yet the singers still transfigure the familiar, even the most banal of lyrics becoming unexpectedly meaningful when overlaid with the notion of the accumulated memories and experiences of old age.

Nat King Cole and Jim Reeves numbers supply a smokily ruminative air, tenderly expressing loneliness and loves lost. Bruce Springsteen’s You’re Missing bespeaks quietly keening bereavement. But it’s the surprises that hit home. The Travelling Wilburys’ Handle With Care sounds a tad MOR, until you’re brought up short by the lines, “I’ve been robbed and ridiculed/In daycare centres and night schools”, shocking words from elderly lips.

Neil Sedaka’s sunnily bland Love Will Keep Us Together abruptly, and thrillingly, turns into Joy Division’s doomy Love Will Tear Us Apart. And a buxom redhead makes snarling solo work of the Buzzcocks’ punky complaint What Do I Get? There’s jubilation, too — and terpsichorean glee — in the disco classics Dance to the Music and Ain’t no Stopping us Now. It’s a chaotic sequence, but triumphantly juxtaposes the joyous with the overall tone of reflective melancholy.

Young@Heart are collectively emblematic of our humanity and mortality, a maverick spirit cackling and capering in the face of convention. May they never run out of road.

From The Times (TimesOnline)