Best We Forget – isthisyours?

Overview

Neuroscience, metanarrative and some embarrassing memories walk into a bar... no, wait, an academic conference? No, actually a bar. Not only is Best We Forget, presented by Tamarama Rock Surfers and created by isthisyours? on the stage at the Old Fitz, the start of the piece sees the audience's attention drawn to a couple of boxes of wine at one end of the tables at which the three performers are seated, and an invitation is issued for people to help themselves at any time during the show.

The show launches in symposium style with Jude Henshall moderating and Nadia Rossi and Ellen Steele as guest panellists. Each of the three introduces some facts about memory and forgetting, and their interest in the area, and the science is sound. The three neatly coiffed performers sit behind nameplates and exchange scripted banter along with their increasingly subjective and absurd views on memory and cognition, and they return to this stage format at intervals throughout the play, intercutting with individual scenes.

Steele, who introduces her interest in memory as being focussed on Hollywood depictions of memory loss, undertakes an action-hero quest to get a personal photographic record after an opening monologue in which she finds herself absent from all her own mementos of her uni years. Rossi, an avowed rememberer of faces and forgetter of names, reveals stories of the ways people have reacted to her forgetting, and takes the audience through images and objects from her childhood and teenage years and provides graphs mapping her memories and preoccupations. Henshall, meanwhile, does a comic torch song silhouetted by a fog machine, and performs the start of a Dictionary of Memory that segues into a demonstration of how the show might be remembered by the audience in accordance with the operation of the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve.

This chopped-up recap of the 'most memorable' parts of the show is particularly interesting in that it not only shows highlights of what has already been performed but also includes bits of action that are yet to occurr, underlining these in advance and making them more memorable because they're expected. It also makes for great physical comedy, in that the performances are exaggerated and sped up and acquire extra significance through being repeated.

The idea of just how meta this all is is literalised in the set, with the trio retiring to an identical-but-smaller set to the one in which they started that is above it, in which is revealed a picture of the three in the same sort of setting but at yet another remove. Like memories, Best We Forget happens in pieces and things change as they get played out over and over again. If, as the show contends, things are still happening as long as they are still being thought about, then Best We Forget is much longer than the hour its billed as.