Creators: 18-25 Bush Young Company and Amber Ruby
Director: Amber Ruby
In Before We Forget, Recall Technologies offers to ‘store’ bad memories, sold as a mercy for veterans and trauma survivors – or so insists a CEO gloriously blind, or more likely indifferent, to how far his company has drifted – chanting ‘Recall Today, Recall Forever’ and ‘Profits, profits, profits’. Albeit a two-dimensional way to write a villain, the first hour it lands some laughs. The Bush Young Company’s devised piece spends that hour exploring how this business works, and its last stretch pricing the human costs behind it.
Josephine Surminksi’s Josie tickles as she walks clients through the ‘storing’ process, whilst pattering through a company fine print that waives liability for everything up to side effects, including insanity. Recall’s ‘employee evaluation’ scenes draw on the same theme, redolent of Severance – Milichick’s condescending cheer for the comic Harmony Cobel’s cold control for the dystopia – the employees are spotlit and interrogated on their motivations for staying at Recall.
The production’s best idea is Meg (Meg Gillard) and Shekinah (Shekinah Singh), former lovers who return time and again to wipe their memories of each other. Unbeknownst to them and some Recall employees, Recall has engineered the treatment to fail so that relapse keeps the client paying. Georgia Wilmot’s black organza curtains, pulled across the stage in quadrants, turn replays of each of their memories into competing versions of events, divided by a veil that is sometimes crossed.
The production frays in the final quarter. A protest against Recall turns violent without much warning, and Ruweyda Sheik-Ali’s protester clashes with her sister, Mannan Gulled’s Recall employee. The argument ends somewhere unearned, ‘How can we make our voices heard to people who don’t even see you as human’, aimed less at her sister than at the audience themselves, and the piece perversely wants that line to license the Luigi Mangione-reminiscent terror that follows – the CEO’s murder, watched live over video call. The line is the dramatic equivalent of Katniss Everdeen turning to the camera mid Hunger Games to tell the cinema who to vote for and suggests a somehow justified martyrdom that lands abrasively.
The first hour is sharp and quick-witted enough that this lands as disappointment rather than disaster. Surminski isn’t finished either, her best laughs arriving not long after Before We Forget’s worst stumble. A young company still honing its craft gets more right than wrong: sharpest where it trusts itself, shakiest where it preaches.
Runs until 22 August 2026
The Reviews Hub Star Rating
60%
Sharpest where it trusts itself