'Low-key, cerebral and very touching', Lorna Irvine finds the ingredients to a winning production.
Donna Rutherford has great presence and a soothing voice, the kind of person who would be wonderful at reading bedtime stories. But Wilful Forgetting, co-written by Rutherford with Martin O' Connor (who provides fine voiceover work here) is no bedtime story. Rather, it’s a melancholic study of a mother who cannot accept her teenage son's homosexuality, driving him out of the family home.
The set by Rebecca Hamilton is an exercise in Scottish kitsch, with projected fireplace, larder and window and the songs all familiar pub karaoke standards—and yet, this only serves to underline the loneliness and bittersweet monologue of the mother, slugging from a gin bottle and baking a (real) cake.
As Rutherford, glam in her tailored velvet dress but barefoot, pours the love for her missing son into baking (an act she did with him as a child), she speaks of the impermanence of all things, of how memories only betray us as we select the very best and worst of times past, ignoring all the shades in between.
Photograph albums are sifted through “with one photograph missing” as though the sheer longing for her only child can bring him back.
Low-key, cerebral and very touching—and there's also free delicious cake slices for all: the ingredients are just so.
Part of Glasgay! 2013. Run complete.
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