This award-winning, one-man murder mystery comes to the Guildford Fringe Festival following its successful US and Canada tour. Anais Suzuki speaks to the mastermind behind the play, Leicester-based comedian Rob Gee, about how he drew upon his own experiences as a psychiatric nurse to shed new light on dementia...
Q: Tell me about the play and what message you want to send to the audience...
A: Okay, so the play has a fairly self-explanatory title, it’s called Forget Me Not - The Alzheimer’s Whodunit and it’s a murder mystery set on a dementia ward. I play 15 characters who deliver a series of troupes, clues, plot flaws, red herrings. First, it’s a crime caper - it’s a one-man whodunit but there’s quite a satirical edge to it as well.
It raises some very difficult questions in terms of how far we fund and resource care places. I was a psychiatric nurse for 12 years and as a student, I worked in this very grotty elderly ward and I left under a cloud after reporting some of the behaviours that I saw. Forget Me Not is based on that ward so it’s quite nice that it’s now being used to help other health care staff.
Q: So, why did you choose to use comedy to explore such a serious issue?
A: Well, for a very simple reason, you don’t get bottoms on seats telling people how crap everything is. George Bernard Shaw once said: “If you’re going to tell the truth, make them laugh or they’ll kill you.” As someone who earns a living doing solo shows, I’m always looking for a good story to tell and I’ve always wanted to have a go at doing a solo whodunit show where I’m playing all the characters.
The setting for a whodunit really needs to be an enclosed environment like a plane, a castle or an island and I thought where better than a dodgy, old, elderly, challenging behaviour ward in the 1990s? Because with 13 verbally incontinent patients with ‘challenging behaviour’ you wouldn’t be able to put them anywhere, you wouldn’t be able to evacuate the ward when you found your first dead body, you’d have to lock it down. So bam, you’ve got your whodunit right there. I had lots to say about dementia and I was looking for a vehicle for it, so the two came together rather happily.
Q: Why a one-man show?
A: I like doing solo shows, my background is a stand-up character, doing poetry slams and spoken word shows. There’s something quite glorious, you go on stage and it’s just you and a chair. You just create this whole world for people with (just) this chair but the audience’s imagination will do the rest.
Q: What have you enjoyed the most throughout this process?
A: It was a very difficult show to write but it was a really nice experience to perform it. For the NHS training, the initial meeting consisted of me performing the show without any lights or music, just doing the words but performing it to a room of about six NHS managers. That was surreal.
Q: What challenges have you been faced with so far?
A: Well, it’s a comedy about Alzheimer’s. People do assume that it’s going to be a load of nonsense like Finding Nemo, kind of memory jokes. There have been a couple of times where we’ve got to a village and found some posters destroyed by some angry residents. There’s a lot of that but people still do come. It’ll still sell out in these little places but I’ve had conversations beforehand where people are going ‘well I don’t like the look of your poster’, but then I’m thinking, ‘you’re here!’. I think people just like to be cross. People assume that you’re coming at it from the wrong angle, but when they find out that I worked as a nurse in psychiatry for 12 years, and after looking at the awards and the reviews, hopefully, that will be enough to reassure them.
Forget Me Not is on at Star Inn from 5 to 6 pm on Sunday the 21st of July. Tickets are £8 with a £1 online booking fee. For more information visit: https://guildfordfringefestival.com/sessions/forget-me-not-the-alzheimers-whodunnit/
