Somewhere between Remembering and Forgetting

Abstract

Inspired by Hamlet, The Middle (2013) was a one-man show devised for a theatre foyer - a liminal space between the outside and the inside, the real world and the theatre. Hamlet is a character caught in a limbo between ‘To be or not to be’ and by casting his father, Tony Pinchbeck, to play the title role, Michael Pinchbeck sought to explore time passing, staging ageing and the relationship between father and son. Tony studied Hamlet when he was at school so he is stuck in the middle between the fading memory of reading that play 50 years ago and reading it now.For this article, Pinchbeck reflects on the complex dramaturgical process of working with his father to revisit his performative memories. The contemporary dramaturg's job is to look for and after something that is not yet found. As David Williams tells Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt, ‘you don't really know what is being sought’. As such, the dramaturg is in a limbo, or in the middle, between finding and looking, knowing and not knowing. The Middle (2013) speaks about the themes of liminality, ageing, stasis and mortality and the archiving of memory and explores this space in between generations, between stages, between ages.This article reflects on concepts of memory, time passing and ageing with Professor Michael Mangan, who explores these themes in his publication Staging Ageing: Narratives of Decline (2013). The article weaves together Pinchbeck's dramaturgical experience of making the performance with a father, and Mangan's experience of watching it through the lens of his research, and touches upon recent casting choices in order to explore issues of age and ageing and reminiscence theatre. The article is in two acts to be read without an interval.