Jochem Stavenuiter is fifteen. Slouchy, a grunter, in his bedroom turning up the volume on his masterblaster. He escapes to run fast across the fields to the dyke and to scream and scream.

It is an instantly recognisable teenage response to crisis and perfectly captures the changes going on in the lives of Jochem and his mother, who has recently had a severe and brain-altering stroke.

The ninety minutes that follow are by turns affecting, thought provoking and gently humorous. The progression of Eleonora’s illness is told with a direct honesty that is compelling.

On a space filled with little more than a random selection of wooden chairs, Jochem creates the main locations of his story. The house the family lives in, the ‘plantage’ where his mother now lives, his schoolroom, and the flat landscape of the Dutch countryside.

Subtle music provides atmosphere and punctuates key moments of action but never overwhelms. The piece is well lit too, with the audience not in total darkness, bringing us closer to the actor and his characters.

There is a narrative thread skillfully woven through the performance. One night, having sung with her regular choir, Eleonora is taken by taxi to a hospital 35km away where she is staying to have tests. But, forgetfully given the wrong surname, she is not recognised on the computer and is turned away. It is 11.30pm. She has dementia. It is raining.

Flashback to the ‘plantage’ for a longer section that illustrates Eleonora’s daily life and Jochem’s weekly visits to her. Here we get to grips with what life is like for someone with a short-term memory, whose sons get progressively younger in her mind, who casts other patients as characters in a play, who gets flashes of insight into current time then disappears into the past.

Jochem is fascinated by the other inmates as befits a soon-to-be actor. He enacts some of them, the ex-bank CEO who strides about demanding ‘the code’ for the door until he wears out his body and has to be strapped into a wheelchair; the man who dangles slime from his mouth like a trophy; the Afro-American woman who strokes the carpeted table and talks softly to herself all day long.

He has great physicality and doesn’t overplay these representations. It is a touchstone of the whole performance style of the play, balanced and careful.

He also presents his frustration both with his mother in her moments of complete disorientation and with his inability to do more for her, to bring her back.

Then forward to the night when there is ringing at the door at 4am and outside is Eleonora, cold and wet. She has found her way home from the distant hospital. How she did this, with only 25 guilders in her purse, we, and Jochem, never know.

The play is nicely devoid of post-modernism until a final twist (spoiler alert). It is present day, and Jochem describes a cycle ride home with a chum, on which he is navigated, not to his flat, but to a rehabilitation centre where he apparently now lives.

It is a glimpse at what it might be like to live in his mother’s brain as much as a reflection on the games that theatre can play.

Bambie is a Dutch performance group founded twenty years ago by Jochem Stavenuiter and Paul van der Laan. Eleonora is directed by Hans Man in’t Veld and was performed in English for the first time at the Basement as part of the SICK festival, supported by The Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England and Brighton and Hove City Council.