Forget Me Not ***

Bush Theatre, London

EXCERPT: "Tom Holloway's Forget Me Not feels a couple of drafts short of being a better play. The characters are woefully underdeveloped, a fact not helped by the production, which limps along."

Summary

In Australia, Gerry hopes to meet his mother for the first time. Despite being almost sixty, he has spent his whole life believing he’s an orphan. In Liverpool, Mary brews a good, strong pot of tea. Nothing posh. But she’s as nervous as a pig at a butcher’s. Determined to uncover his past, Gerry and his daughter Sally embark on an extraordinary journey home – halfway across the world – in a precarious bid to bring their family together.

Thoughts

Tom Holloway's Forget Me Not feels a couple of drafts short of being a better play. The characters are woefully underdeveloped, a fact not helped by the production, which limps along. The play's plot entirely hinges on a situation which could be emotionally very engaging if it wasn't for the fundamental emptiness behind the characters. Their only backstory is in relation to this particular situation, we get no sense of them as being people. There is a real attempt to tug at our heart strings, but the repeated efforts to do so feel disappointingly lacklustre and laboured. Russell Floyd in the lead role is disappointing, the whole thing is dragged out far too slowly, the play doesn't seem to serve any wider purpose and can't achieve its goal of emotional manipulation in the way it clearly wants to, and the music is so intensely dramatic that it only serves to exacerbate the sense that they're falling short in what they've set out to achieve. Not a good job done from director Steven Atkinson.