Theatre
Forget-Me-Not
MITP Theatre

We are all travellers: we start our journey at birth and hurtle along towards our inevitable end at a staggering pace. Too often, we become so focused on the future that we forget where we’ve come from or how far we’ve arrived.

Dù Theatre last weekend delivered a performance piece which relied on one element of magic realism: what it would be like to relive a memory, reconnect with the past and, in the process, find out more about yourself.

Forget-Me-Not told the story of Danny (Yosef Farrugia) whose ordinary but happy existence is disrupted by a flash of someone on the bus who reminded him of his mother: the mother who loved him but abandoned him at a young age.

Dù Theatre has once again created an imaginative, artistic and tasteful piece which touches the heart, provokes the mind and whispers to the soul

I classify this piece of contemporary theatre a “performance piece” because it worked well beyond the constraints and conventions of the traditional play. While the plot was linear and easy enough to follow, the narrative method was poly-artistic, relying heavily on set design, lighting design, original music, voice recordings, mime and dance. There were elements in it when Danny’s daily routine was being enacted by Farrugia and Elise Ellul, who played Danny’s girlfriend, which were reminiscent of Disney’s Paperman – an Oscar-winning wordless, animated short in black and white. But unlike the endearing light-heartedness of this film, Forget-Me-Not – which was written and directed by Simone Spiteri, who also played the Mother and provided the voice recordings for the Mother’s memories – dealt with the destructive forces of dwelling on the past.

Haunted by his mother’s memory, Danny meets the mysterious and manipulative Memory Keeper (Magda Van Kuilenburg), who somehow knows enough how to intrigue him and gives him a gift: the forget-me-not flower – the same flower he’d once found as a boy and given to his mother.

Its power was to transport him back in a flood of memories to his childhood and relive his experiences with his mother. As the Memory Keeper warned, “the bad comes with the good”. His yearning for more memories to fill the void and understand why his mother left, rip through Danny’s present and destroy it, as he becomes more engrossed with the past. The analogy is clear: obsession leads to addiction and these take over your life.

With original music by Tim Ellis and Chris Galea, who also provided the voice-over for the adult Danny, this multifaceted production made use of film projected on to Pierre Portelli’s simple but highly effective and well-planned set design. This consisted of several wooden frames, panelled in sheer scrim – where the ones at the far end were hinged and the central panel could slide up and down – on to which running shots could be screened individually, making up a moving montages of garbled memories, which grew into a more coherent one as Danny fell deeper into the void of his past.

Chris Gatt’s excellent light design also illuminated the screens, showing different stylised scenarios. The one element marring an otherwise flawless technical performance was a lack of clarity in the older Danny’s voice recording which serves as occasional narrator and highlights some of his thought processes.

The piece was devised by the four performers and Farrugia and Ellul’s stylised choreography (both are performance dancers) reflected the characters’ dance through life. Their expressiveness and fluidity were great to watch, while Van Kuilenburg has proved, once again, what a versatile character actress she is.

Danny’s eventual reconciliation with his mother and the demons from his past hints at a cyclical event, as he catches sight of someone else at the end of the performance.

Fulfilling all the promises of a night of intellectual entertainment, Dù Theatre has once again created an imaginative, artistic and tasteful piece which touches the heart, provokes the mind and whispers to the soul.