Forget Me Not at Belvoir St Theatre

Gerry is almost 60, and he is going to meet his mother for the first time since he was three. His daughter Sally has had it up to here with him and his problems. The old lady lives somewhere in the UK. Liverpool, according to the records. So Gerry is going there to find out what made him who he is.

Tom Holloway’s gem of a play started life as a conversation between Belvoir and Liverpool’s Everyman and Playhouse Theatres. Holloway’s task was to tell the story of the 3,000-odd English children who, between 1945 and 1968, were told they were orphans and sent to Australia on a promise of warmth, fresh air, abundant food and boundless opportunity. Instead they arrived to deprived institutions where neglect and abuse were the norm.

Holloway’s brilliant leap of imagination has been to set this story not at its outset half a century ago, but here and now. He has written a series of raw, often achingly beautiful conversations between members of a scattered family. Drawing the whole thing together is Gerry’s extraordinary, precarious bid to finally learn what it means to love and belong to a family.

Belvoir’s own Anthea Williams (Old Man) directs this exquisite portrait of a man on a journey to meet the mother he never knew.