Before We Forget – Bush Theatre review

Zarmeeneh Khan and Priscilla Oshinibosi

A funny, sharp satire on a tech company’s promise to let you relive your best memories

In Before We Forget, which played for just a few performances last week at the Bush Theatre, American Tech arrives in the UK in the form of Recall, a concept promising “a better relationship with your memories”: a sort of memory archiving service that allows its customers to instantly relive chosen moments from their past.

In a fragmented narrative, resembling perhaps how we experience memory itself, we see employees of Recall recruiting customers, hero worshipping their clearly loopy CEO, debating emerging moral dilemmas relating to the technology they control and managing their clients as they revisit cherished moments from their past.

Shekinah Singh and Meg Gillard

Woven into this is a memory of a budding stop/start romance which just won’t work out properly without some modification, presenting something of an ethical challenge.

Meanwhile a renegade group of dissenting young people plot to try and derail the project, recognising it for the terrifying overreach it represents.

If this all sounds a bit po-faced, then fear not, not only is it very funny in places, but there is a real energy and bite to the satire on show. The Recall promise to introduce customers to “the purest version” of themselves is set against a plea to trust the tech, after all, it can help “to find what’s inside” and, of course, there will be “access for all.”

Ethan Simm

Performed by an exuberant ensemble, Before We Forget was created by the 18-25 Young Company at the Bush, under the skilful organising eye of Director Amber Ruby who made full use of the whole of the Holloway Theatre stage, gleefully breaking the fourth wall at times; at others isolating individuals at significant, often emotional moments, while other company members lurk in the shadows.

There’s nonsense spoken about temporal lobes and cerebral cortexes as the Recall employees work themselves up until they are “super-excited”, trying to pull us in, chanting the company mantra of “Recall now, Recall forever” and insisting that this idea is “not just going global, it’s going celestial.”

At times the scarily smiley evangelists for Recall work on us as spectators, imploring us to trust them; the young woman performing in front of the section of the audience I sat in had a full-on Book of Mormon smile that actually forced a nervous laugh from me, the kind you do during a horror film to relieve the tension (me scared? Nah.)

The obvious influence is Dark Mirror, along with any number of dystopian sci-fi stories warning us of unrestrained Big Tech overreach.

This is a show full of ideas, eager to entertain every bit as much as to make you stop and think and it’s worthy of a longer run or a revival. In light of the arguably worrying influence that Big Tech has over our own Government, Before We Forget offers a warning and a call to resistance from a talented young company, that many will find heartening. There’s hope for humanity yet.

All photos from the production credited to Harry Elletson

Simon Thomsett has worked in the professional theatre for a number of years. He started out as a stage manager and technician then became a venue director and producer, notably at the Hackney Empire, Fairfield Halls and most recently the New Victoria Theatre in Woking.

He now works as a consultant and on some small scale producing projects. He is a Chiswick resident and a passionate advocate for great theatre.