Winner of the Pleasance’s Charlie Hartill Fund, Unforgettable Girl was written by and stars Elisabeth Gunawan, who received The Stage Debut Award winner for Best Performer in a Play for the play’s previous two-night run.
Kyll Anthony Thomas Cole (Flabbergast Theatre’s Macbeth; Told by an Idiot’s Would You Bet Against Us?) completes the cast for this Offie Award-winning production.
The piece is directed by female-led Lecoq-formed theatre company Created a Monster, whose work – tending always towards bouffon, the art of mockery – uses bright, sharp theatre languages to explore dark, hellish worlds.
More information can be found here
You’re bringing Unforgettable Girl to Edinburgh Fringe, what can you tell us about the show?
‘Unforgettable Girl’ is a no-holds-barred bouffon-esque myth exploring the dehumanisation of female bodies of colour in our culture. We tell the story through the character of Vaccine, a mail order bride who breaks out of an Amazon prime box and greets the audience.
Contrary to the promise of a woman for sale, Vaccine makes the audience laugh, squirm and wince, and reveals our shared complicity and desperation in the face of a tyrannous standard of beauty and femininity that renders women like Vaccine irredeemable. The piece engages with bouffon, a form sometimes called the ‘anti-clown’—historically they were outcasts of society who had no stake in preserving humanity’s dignity and often only had power when they were entertaining and performing. Louise Peacock once said that while we make fun of the clown, the bouffon makes fun of us (with diabolical humour).
Women of colour are constantly marginalized from narratives of womanhood, beauty and freedom. Our bodies and images are constantly exoticized, commodified and shaped as Other and profane.
If I can cite some of our audience reactions, people have called it ‘hilarious’, ‘terrifying’, ‘mythic’ and ‘a million times more interesting than Netflix!’
What first inspired you to write it?
Unforgettable Girl began as my manifesto piece (equivalent to a dissertation piece) at RADA. At the time, I was the only East Asian actress in the entire school (there was an East Asian actor in my class, and two women in technical theatre departments)—I remember making a joke about not being able to skip class because it would be immediately noticeable.
This experience was aggravated by an intangible anger that would arise whenever something along these lines would happen: when we did scene work on Hedda Gabler and only the white women in the class were assigned scenes as Hedda, when our final show explored female power and the #MeToo movement through the character of a Hollywood actress (who was of course: white, thin and preferably blonde).
It echoed the feelings I have always had as someone who comes from 3 generations of migrants/settlers/refugees, as someone who has spent most of my life labelled as ‘Other’ or ‘minor’ (as ‘Chinese’ in Indonesia, as ‘Asian’ in the US and the UK). Around the same time as these questions were percolating in my head, news broke out about the Essex lorry deaths and the shooting at an Atlanta Spa that killed 6 East Asian women. The latter was rapidly followed by a barrage of happy ending jokes on the internet.
What does it mean to build dignity, and a new vision of personhood and womanhood, within a world that constantly dehumanizes us—that laughs at our deaths? As a woman of colour, I have the paradoxical privilege of being given entry into white spaces. But being given entry also means being constantly pushed to the margins: forgotten, condescended, ignored, less than. I think it empowers us to acknowledge that we still have a long way to go, and to use that inspiration to keep writing and telling stories and making theatre that truly seeks to connect with audiences.
Why was it so important to you to share your experience of drama school in this production?
Something that I keep returning to as an artist is my passion of telling stories about the places we all go (but when we go we are always alone). Through theatre, we can take individual experiences of trauma and marginalization that often isolate us and reflect on it together as a community. My hope is that people (particularly other women of colour, but the traumas and experiences explored in the piece are not exclusively experienced by them) will feel less alone from seeing this piece.
They might have experienced it in other settings (not at a drama school as I did), but the palpable feeling of being condescended, pushed to the side, unseen and unvalued, can be so damaging and isolating. What felt like a strange and beautiful homecoming for ‘Unforgettable Girl’ was when a recording of the first work-in-progress performance at Bloomsbury Festival was screened at an artists’ residency hosted by Moi Tran at Hawkwood College. The audience was a tight-knit group of East Asian female artists and thought leaders, one of them began to cry and said ‘I thought I was the only one.’ At the end of the day, the piece seeks to affirm and strengthen people in experiences of marginalization (and to decenter and question those in power) in ways that empower us all—in pride and in humility.
The play is one of the winners of Pleasance’s Charlie Hartill Fund, how does that feel, and what opportunities has it given you?
So humbled and honoured—this is a first time for myself and for Created a Monster to bring a show up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The stars have truly aligned for us: to work with such a supportive and A+ team at The Pleasance, to get a full-length run alongside other brilliant shows (Santi & Naz, Pitch, Public – The Musical), to get the support of Keep It Fringe—this means we get to do an Edinburgh run without needing to remortgage a house we don’t have, or sell a kidney! We are aware of how lucky we are within a festival that can be structurally quite inaccessible.
You’ll perform in Unforgettable Girl alongside Kyll Anthony Thomas Cole, what are you most looking forward to about working together?
Kyll is an incredible talented, generous, and sensitive performer. He plays the role of Management, a sort of on-stage stage manager. The whole performance is a sort of ego-death ritual for the central character, and Kyll’s character is a sort of compassionate and precise executioner of the ritual. It gives me lots of courage to know that I’ll be sharing the stage with him every day the whole run!
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see Unforgettable Girl?
Please, come join us! I promise you won’t be bored. Otherwise, as Vaccine will make clear in the beginning of the piece, we welcome you to laugh, or cry with us, or to agree or disagree, or to leave if you need. We feel very proud of this piece we created together, and we are so excited to share it with a wider audience.
