Forget Me Not

Overview

If your childhood was filled with love, it's hard to imagine having gone without. But it's important, sometimes, to be shown what that path looks like, because it's a determinant for the future a person can expect to have. In Belvoir's Forget Me Not, a coproduction with Liverpool's Everyman Theatre, 60ish-year-old Gerry (Colin Moody) drinks to obliteration, is mistrustful and belligerent and gets disorientated when his daughter holds his hand. His life has been beleaguered and lonely. And all this time, he had a mother who loved him, halfway across the earth, and he didn't know.

Gerry is representative of the some 3000 British children who were removed from their (usually single, underprivileged) mothers between 1945 and 1968 and sent, for some barely comprehensible reason, to Australia, to live in institutions. It's tragic to realise, but the iconic Australian story might be one of stolen children. In Gerry's case, it's his daughter, Sally (Mandy McElhinney), who contacts the family restoration fund and makes Gerry an appointment with Mark (Oscar Redding), a case worker who tracks down Gerry's sweet Liverpudlian mother, Mary (Eileen O'Brien).

The last plays from both writer Tom Holloway and director Anthea Williams, And No More Shall We Part and Old Man, each met with general acclaim — and many tears. Their respective themes of ageing and absent parents seem to merge in Forget Me Not, although it's actually a far more multidimensional, measured and impressive play than its predecessors. There are so many tiny details woven into the script that reveal bit by bit the devastating reality of growing up without love, or of growing old without the one you love. The sight of an adult man being unable to eat a slice of cake has never been so heartbreaking.

It's also a script about saying a lot with silences, and Williams has been able to realise those wondrously, filling them with tension and longing. It pays to sit close so in these moments you can study the actors' faces, pinched and pulled by subtle prompts. Both marshmallow-in-a-hard-shell Moody and sparkling survivor O'Brien quickly win your sympathy, so you want more than anything for mother and son to connect and get something back from their years of separation.

Forget Me Not also has a nice, lazy Susan-utilising set from designer Dan Potra, which creates a repeating language of homeliness and which Moody never seems to fit. Forget Me Not is a real knockout, and the punch lands even if the history seemed previously distant to you.