Showing @ Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 12 Nov

Researchers predict that 1 in 85 people will suffer from Alzheimer’s by 2050, and with that comes a series of, at present, unanswerable questions on our fragile mortality. It is this struggle with the arcane which perhaps makes Abi Morgan’s study on the spiritual nature of Alzheimer’s so forceful, while finding itself typically overproduced by the National Theatre of Scotland.

Based around Dr. David Snowdon’s 1986 research project, his so-called ‘nun study’ in which he attempted to discover why Alzheimer’s would develop in some people and not others, director Vicky Featherstone sets up shop in a small convent. From Autumn 2006 to Spring 2011, Dr. Richard Garfield (Nicholas Le Prevost) and his team of sponsors and researchers visit the women to carry out their exams, as Garfield’s love for Sister Ursula (Maureen Beattie) threatens to upset the harmony holding the characters together.

What Featherstone orchestrates throughout this production is a sense of debate, an open arena with mingling ideas that occupy two very different landscapes bridged by the enigmatic illness. The researchers reflect a forensic, pragmatic approach to treatment and assessment as they pressure agreements to study Sister Miriam (Colette O’Neil), while the nuns distance themselves from science, quoting from proverbs and reciting their daily duties. Designer Merle Hensel captures this sense of space with aplomb, as imposing wooden walls slide apart to reveal projected images of the shifting seasons and a floating panel staircase stretches alongside the adjacent structure as if reaching up to Heaven. But this space becomes less of an alienation tactic and more a form of mutual inclusivity, as both positions must fill the void, whether it is gaps in religious belief, the uncertainty of scientific study or our wandering empathy as an audience.

Yet the play, constantly billed as reactionary by Featherstone and Morgan, isn’t necessarily a potent enough comment on our brittle impermanence. Waiting to be taken off the shelf after its conception in 2007, the play uses the nature vs. nurture debate to telegraph its somewhat deterministic message on the inevitability of our death, a fading discussion which weakly props up so many classical discourses on causality. This owes itself to the inconclusive quality of Snowdon’s original research, suggesting that a cure may yet be decades away, if even at all possible. Writer Libby Brooks claimed earlier this year that ‘Alzheimer’s disease is compelling in fiction because it is so cruel in life’; Morgan captures this wholeheartedly in her characters and narrative, but dawdles on the philosophical points we already know so much about.