We sat down for a quick chat with Guillaume Pigé, Theatre Re’s Artistic Director.
Internationally acclaimed Theatre Re marks the 10th anniversary of its award-winning production The Nature of Forgetting with an extensive UK and international tour. Combining breathtaking visual storytelling with original live music, the moving, non-verbal production follows Tom, a man living with early-onset dementia, as fragments of his past come flooding back. Developed with neuroscience professor Kate Jeffery and the Alzheimer’s Society, the production has captivated audiences across 17 countries and now returns for its landmark anniversary.
After more than 200 performances across 17 countries, how do you keep The Nature of Forgetting alive as an act of discovery rather than allowing precision to harden into routine?
This is the key question, and one that has been with us for the past 10 years! I think the answer lies in what makes live theatre an irreplaceable experience.
All our work is based on actions – actions in response to what you see and what you hear. In other words, we find our motivation to move in our partner’s eyes. You need to be open, available and ready in order to be truly responsive. If you are not trying to manufacture something, but genuinely responding to what is happening in front of you, then things will keep changing.
We are also very fortunate to have had many different performers, from various backgrounds and training, take over the roles. Each new performer brings a new energy, curiosity and expertise. They question the work and make new imaginative connections. So even though the piece remains the same, it has kept evolving and changing, becoming more and more refined and sculpted with each new collaboration.
The production asks what remains of a person when memories begin to disappear. Did your collaboration with neuroscientists change your understanding of where identity resides?
Common experience tells us that we forget far more than we remember, and research confirms that the brain selects which memory traces will be retained and which will be discarded. We are therefore as much a product of our forgetting as of our memories.
And yet, much of what we think we have lost in the mists of time can return with the onset of memory decline. So forgetting also offers the possibility of retrieving the past. I find it absolutely fascinating.
This is also something I noticed during the interview sessions that we led in collaboration with the Alzheimer’s Society during the development process: some long-term memories, which had apparently been forgotten, seemed to become more vivid than ever before. We used this phenomenon in the development of Tom’s journey.
So, to answer your question, the collaboration did not change my understanding so much of where identity resides, but rather of what makes our identity.
Dementia is often represented through absence and decline. How did you avoid reducing Tom to his diagnosis while remaining honest about the cruelty of the condition?
Our aim was never, and still isn’t, to make a show about dementia. Quite the opposite. The Nature of Forgetting is about the fragility of life, and the importance of being in the present. We use dementia as a tool through which to unravel that fragility.
Our process is also rooted in the world of actions. We are constantly looking for actions, and I think this commitment helps us avoid falling into sentimentality, where our main character could become passive in response to his condition. Tom is always doing, trying, searching, rebuilding. His condition creates obstacles, but those obstacles do not define who he is.
Without spoken dialogue, movement, music and design must carry both the narrative and Tom’s inner life. What can the body communicate about memory that language cannot?
Memory works visually and our hippocampus – a small region located at the centre of the brain – acts a little bit like a workshop area where memories are constructed. For instance, if we try to remember our first kiss at school, space – the classroom – is the first thing that gets constructed in our hippocampus. Then, that space is filled with more details such as wooden school desks for instance, and then with people – other children, the teacher…etc. And then the actual event – the kiss – comes last. So when we remember we visually construct and reconstruct memories.
Portraying forgetting on stage thus became about introducing more and more physical problems in this visual re-construction, and that is where the movement and visuals take their full potential.
The production has moved between countries and cultures with very different attitudes towards dementia, ageing and family responsibility. Which audience response has most challenged your original understanding of the work?
Interestingly enough, audience responses have been remarkably similar around the world. Of course, there are differences in the ways people express their responses, but everywhere we have been, people have been deeply touched by the piece and have felt compelled to share their own experiences with us after the show.
This is always very touching and humbling. For me, it means that even though we come from different cultures and backgrounds, we are all human. We share many of the same fears and desires. We all have memories, and we are all afraid of losing them.
Perhaps that is what has surprised me most: not how differently the work has been received around the world, but how similarly. I wonder if this is also linked to the way we communicate our story – through live music and visuals. Everyone is invited to project their own imagination into the work, allowing it to become deeply personal to them.
You have said that this production helped shape Theatre Re’s performance language. Ten years later, are you refining the same piece—or is each revival quietly creating a different one?
I think it is a bit of both. Each revival of the show allows for continuous refinement, and ultimately the piece is very different now from what it was ten years ago – and yet it is still the same.
Perhaps it is a little like us as we grow older. We change, we accumulate experiences, we become more refined and perhaps understand ourselves a little better. We are different from who we were ten years ago, and yet somehow we are still ourselves.
I think The Nature of Forgetting has done the same.