TWO MONTHS after he delighted Town Hall audience with his acclaimed solo show Silent, actor Pat Kinevane makes a welcome return to next week with Forgotten, his equally lauded one-man piece on old age and care of the elderly.
Presented by Fishamble Theatre Company, Forgotten explores four characters, between the ages of 80 and 100 years old, who reside in care facilities and retirement homes. Presented in a fusion of European and Japanese Kabuki theatrical styles, the play is a dark and comical portrayal of the challenges facing older people in Ireland today.
This is a special one night performance of the piece with all proceeds from this one off performance going to support COPE Galway’s Senior Support Services in Galway (as was the case with his recent performance of Silent ).
“I am very honoured to have this opportunity to support the wonderful work of COPE Galway,” Kinevane says, “because I believe nobody should be allowed to suffer alone – no one should be ignored. We cannot leave anyone behind.”
“I cannot thank Pat and Fishamble enough for bringing Forgotten to Galway in aid of our services,” said Fintan Maher of COPE Galway. “Following the wonderful night we had in February when Pat performed Silent I was thrilled when Pat suggested doing a one-off performance of Forgotten in aid of our senior support services here in Galway.”
Forgotten is now in its seventh year of touring. It has been performed across Ireland as well as in England, Scotland, USA, France, Czech Republic, Iceland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey.
The show had its premiere in 2006, at the Bealtaine Festival which promotes greater participation by the elderly in society and celebrates their creativity.
“We were working on the play already when Bealtaine contacted Fishamble to see had we anything suitable,” Kinevane recalls, speaking by phone from his Dublin home. “Jim Culleton [Fishamble’s artistic director] told them as it happened we did have a piece that dealt with a lot of issues that pertain to the elderly and growing old in Ireland so they took it and that was its first public airing, though it was still in a raw stage of its development at that point. We started touring it that autumn and haven’t stopped since.”
Kinevane did a good deal of research prior to writing the play.
“I wanted to look into the whole area of Alzheimer’s and elderly care in Ireland,” he explains. “I researched what counties have different things going on, how many nursing homes are there in the country, what are the needs of the elderly as they go into nursing home care and also questioning society’s whole attitude to the elderly.
“I did a lot of research into all that, and also my sister has been working with the elderly for nearly 30 years in a nursing home so she was able to give me a lot of resource material. The main crux of the play for me was that we had forgotten about people before they have ever gone.
“Our society is obsessed with youth and newness. I remember going to see an old aunt of mine in a nursing home, and it was a beautiful place where she was very well cared for, but I just saw so many men and women there lying in their beds who seemed to be forgotten with no-one visiting them.
“I think western society brainwashes us into rejecting older members of society and pushing them off to the side. I was researching this during height of Celtic Tiger and I found it fascinating that I could see around me people were becoming more and more dependent on their elderly parents to mind their children when they went to work. The elderly were the forgotten heroes.
“My searching brought me to a realisation about the difference between Japanese culture and Irish culture in how they treat the elderly. In Japan there is a sense of duty to look after your elderly relatives and sometimes that can be difficult, but there is virtue in duty and maybe we have somehow lost that sense of duty of care to the elderly.
“It used to be the norm here that you would have three generations of a family living together but things have evolved in a different direction in our recent history and that has to have a repercussion. I was interested in looking at how quickly that happened and what it does to our culture.
“The whole idea of three generations under one roof is probably more natural than just two generations because it gives you an understanding of the abilities of the elderly rather than just their disabilities, their wisdom and so on. It would enable young children to come to terms with ageing and death, they become a natural thing when you live in that situation whereas we tend to try and shield them from that because we’re not exposed to the elderly as much as we were.”
Kinevane describes the four characters he portrays in Forgotten;
“They are in four different parts of the country in four different nursing homes. The central character’s name is Flor; he’s in a kind of half world between clarity and dementia and we see how he deals with that. Then there is Dora who’s a very wealthy lady, she’s from old gentry in Cobh, my own hometown. We see how she approaches the end of life in her nursing home and we see her look back over her life and her romantic life.
“The next character is called Eucharia, she’s a very working class woman from Cork and is happy with her life. The final character is Gustus; he’s in a Dublin nursing home and he can’t speak because of suffering a stroke. The four characters are inter-connected, there was a particular time in 1943 when they were all affected by one event and that’s revealed over the course of the play.”
Forgotten is at the Town Hall Theatre on Tuesday April 17 at 8pm and tickets are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777 and www.tht.ie
