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 Awardwinning 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.
Money can’t buy love, but £19.99/month gets you Unforgettable Girl, a mail-order bride direct from the wasteland of Asian stereotypes. As she strives to become unforgettable, she is forced to transform, destroy and rebuild herself in order to survive. This irreverent bouffon-inspired myth is about the violence our culture inflicts on bodies of colour.
Unforgettable Girl was originally conceived by Gunawan while at RADA in response to her experience as the only East Asian actress in the entire school. As a woman of colour, there was a paradoxical privilege to being given entry into white spaces: it saw her constantly pushed to the margins – forgotten, condescended to, ignored, less than.
This no-holds-barred production interrogates and amplifies the experience of the homo sacer, a dehumanised person rendered dispensable – in this case Vaccine, a mail order bride. Vaccine is a lethal dose of uncomfortable honesty, a playful bouffon and then a grotesque tragedy playing out an unflinching mirror of the white gaze.
Unforgettable Girl delicately probes the awkward, almost violent line that connects these two worlds of whiteness and the other. The piece uses comedy and transformation to guide the audience through shame and guilt into shared experiences of laughter and insight. It challenges the limitations of the white experience and points to the systemic forces that subjugate us all, including those who privilege from it, whilst honouring the experience of someone who is squeezed and degraded through the white lens, and celebrating the defiant claim to survival and love. Its creation was a dialectic between the solitary experiences Gunawan described, and a rehearsal room where the white gaze is ever-present, resulting in a beautifully dangerous piece.
Elisabeth Gunawan comments, Women of colour are constantly marginalised from narratives of womanhood, beauty and freedom. Our bodies and images are constantly exoticized, commodified and shaped as other and profane. Unforgettable Girl was born from that place in the margin we all go, but when we go, we always go alone: an intangible place of fear, desperation and life-giving anger. I’m glad this piece can take a solitary experience and broaden it into something that can contain and captivate an audience for an hour—and playfully challenge them on their complicity within structures that uphold a Eurocentric status quo.
