I’ve long admired
Tom Holloway’s work, not least the way he writes. Ever since I saw Love Me Tender
at Belvoir in 2010, I’ve been struck at the muscular and yet beautiful and
poetic way in which he uses words to create pictures, how he writes and uses
punctuation to create characters, how the characters speak, how the dialogue
sounds, how the play works, the inherent rhythms and repetitions that are built
into the play itself. I love the way he fragments and fractures speech, cuts it up
into bits, chucks it amongst these crazily beautiful lyrical snatches and
creates these haunting word pictures which you cannot shake from your head. Yet,
underneath the language is a tender and rather large beating heart which especially
comes through in his latest play, Forget Me Not,
a co-commission from Belvoir and Liverpool’s
Everyman and Playhouse Theatres.
When Belvoir
announced their 2013 season, I initially thought this would be like Oranges and Sunshine on
stage. And the premise indeed sounds similar: “Gerry is almost 60, and he is going to meet his mother for the first
time since he was three. His daughter Sally has had it up to here with him and
his problems. The old lady lives somewhere in the UK . Liverpool ,
according to the records. So Gerry is going there to find out what made him who
he is.” But the comparison actually does Holloway’s play a disservice, in that
it hints at a bureaucracy and governments that betrayed their people. What the
play does, instead, is show the personal struggle with trying to reconcile who
you are with who you think you are, who you thought you were. And it’s not
lightly that I make the claim of this being one of the most harrowing and yet
simultaneously beautiful pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen.
