A wordless, explosive and deeply tender portrait of a mind losing its grip on the past. Ten years on, Theatre Re’s signature work is as moving as ever.
Racks of clothes fill the stage. A man stands among them, getting ready for his 55th birthday party. This is Tom (Guillaume Pigé, who also conceived and directs the piece), who is living with young onset dementia. As he dresses,his past comes flooding in, and the stage becomes the inside of his head.
Since its 2017 premiere, The Nature of Forgetting has played more than 200 times across 17 countries. For Theatre Re’s tenth anniversary season, it returns to London at the Hackney Empire before touring the UK, China, Korea and the US.
There is very little spoken dialogue, and that is the point. Developed with neuroscience professor Kate Jeffery and the Alzheimer’s Society, the piece tells its story through physical theatre, mime and live music. Words can be among the first things memory lets go of. What survives here is gesture, rhythm and feeling.
Pigé is superb, using his body with a dancer’s precision to capture Tom’s confusion and frustration. Around him, the ensemble moves as one, playing classmates, friends and family while also acting as the forces pulling his memories away.
Clothing unlocks the past. When Tom shrugs on a school blazer, we’re suddenly in the classroom, where memory turns dreamlike: children wield comically oversized pencils, pass notes and scribble through exams, as if trying to fix on paper what the mind cannot hold.
Freeze frames capture moments in time, one of them literally a school photo, and Tom often steps out of them to watch from the outside, a witness to his own life.
Then the memories begin to slip. Actors take props from Tom’s hands mid-flashback. Performers and set pieces tilt sideways, and he can’t set them straight. Small sequences of movement repeat, as if he can’t remember what comes next.
One scene keeps returning: a tense argument with his wife in a car. Once, we hear an approaching vehicle and then a crash, hinting at something terrible. We never learn what happened. Tom can’t remember, so neither can we, and the frustration we feel is a small taste of his.
Alex Judd’s live score distorts just as the memories do, while drums tick-tock throughout like time running out. Percussionist Nathan Gregory is fantastic: as Tom’s frustration builds, the drums grow jarring until we feel it too. The choreography mirrors the score, shifting between fluid and jerky, with chaotic sequences giving way to complete stillness.
Two sequences stand out. In the first, teenagers mess around on a bike, jumping on and off it. The bike never moves, yet it feels like flying: the innocence, recklessness and pure joy of youth, caught in one spot. It’s one of the most beautiful moments of the evening.
The second is the wedding, a whirl of movement, sound and light that stops dead on the kiss with the bride. It captures how we remember big life events: the day is a blur, but certain moments stay. Then Tom stands to make his speech, and we hear nothing, because he can’t remember what he said. The guests tilt away, and the scene slips past him.
In the final scene, the actors fling clothes from the racks into the air while Tom runs around the stage, until only bare hangers remain, a few odd items still clinging on. It’s chaotic and heartbreaking.
The Nature of Forgetting doesn’t pretend that memory loss is anything other than devastating. Yet what lingers is not what Tom loses but what stays with him: the rush of the bike, the stillness of the kiss and the feeling of the moments that mattered.