Creators: 18-25 Bush Young Company and Amber Ruby<\/p>\n
Director: Amber Ruby<\/p>\n
In Before We Forget, Recall Technologies offers to \u2018store\u2019 bad memories, sold as a mercy for veterans and trauma survivors \u2013 or so insists a CEO gloriously blind, or more likely indifferent, to how far his company has drifted \u2013 chanting \u2018Recall Today, Recall Forever\u2019 and \u2018Profits, profits, profits\u2019. Albeit a two-dimensional way to write a villain, the first hour it lands some laughs. The Bush Young Company\u2019s devised piece spends that hour exploring how this business works, and its last stretch pricing the human costs behind it.<\/p>\n
Josephine Surminksi\u2019s Josie tickles as she walks clients through the \u2018storing\u2019 process, whilst pattering through a company fine print that waives liability for everything up to side effects, including insanity. Recall\u2019s \u2018employee evaluation\u2019 scenes draw on the same theme, redolent of Severance \u2013 Milichick\u2019s condescending cheer for the comic Harmony Cobel\u2019s cold control for the dystopia \u2013 the employees are spotlit and interrogated on their motivations for staying at Recall.<\/p>\n
The production\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The production frays in the final quarter. A protest against Recall turns violent without much warning, and Ruweyda Sheik-Ali\u2019s protester clashes with her sister, Mannan Gulled\u2019s Recall employee. The argument ends somewhere unearned, \u2018How can we make our voices heard to people who don\u2019t even see you as human\u2019, 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 \u2013 the CEO\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The first hour is sharp and quick-witted enough that this lands as disappointment rather than disaster. Surminski isn\u2019t finished either, her best laughs arriving not long after Before We Forget\u2019s worst stumble. A young company still honing its craft gets more right than wrong: sharpest where it trusts itself, shakiest where it preaches.<\/p>\n
Runs until 22 August 2026<\/p>\n
\t\t\tThe Reviews Hub Star Rating <\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t60%<\/p>\n
\t\t\tSharpest where it trusts itself<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Creators: 18-25 Bush Young Company and Amber Ruby Director: Amber Ruby In Before We Forget, Recall Technologies offers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15390,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[8284,8285,60,8286,8287,3,8288,65,8289,66],"class_list":["post-15389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-city-of-london","tag-before-we-forget","tag-bush-theatre","tag-city-of-london","tag-georgia-wilmot","tag-josephine-surminski","tag-london","tag-mannan-gulled","tag-review","tag-ruweyda-sheik-ali","tag-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/gbr\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/gbr\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/gbr\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/gbr\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/gbr\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/gbr\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/gbr\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/gbr\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/gbr\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/gbr\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}