Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Three stars
Long before anyone posted selfies on Flickr or Tumblr, or Instagram
allowed just-snapped camera phone images to be customised to whatever
sepia-tinted vintage look is deemed aesthetically pleasing this week,
memories came in Eastmancolour and Kodachrome, and took a week to be
developed. So it goes in Donna Rutherford and Martin O'Connor's lo-fi
multi-media meditation on the past that shapes us, and how the
narrative of memory comes with gaps.
A mother (Rutherford) is at the kitchen table as the audience enter to
the comforting smell of baking. Sporting a maternal pinny, she goes
through the motions of baking a cake as a Country soundtrack plays.
Behind her, images flash up of other mothers proudly showing off their
infant children to be immortalised in their now frayed and crumpled
glory. Inbetween snatches of Rutherford's own out-front monologue,
voices off reveal a schism down the generations as her son comes to
terms with his sexuality, leaving the past behind as he goes.
Commissioned by Glasgay!, and lasting just as long as it takes a cake
to rise, there's something touchingly honest going on here, both in its
depiction of necessary estrangement and in Rutherford's understated
delivery. As Rutherford necks another gin inbetween ingredients, the
pains of a generation bound by traditions not of their own making
aren't difficult to recognise. In this way, Wilful Forgetting is an
elegy of sorts, even as Rutherford and O'Connor's text looks forward to
more complex and possibly more enlightened family affairs. As videos of
some very current mums and babies at play are shown while Rutherford
slices her cake, this snapshot of sons, mothers and mothers mothers
becomes the most loving of purgings.
The Herald, November 8th 2013
ends
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