Actor/writer Pat Kinevan has been performing his solo show, Forgotten, for the past six years, beginning at Fishamble Co. in Ireland (his home base) and touring widely in Europe and the USA after that. Now Kinevan has brought Forgottento L.A.'s Odyssey Theater, as part of Imagine Ireland, Culture Ireland's year of Irish arts in America.
Kinevan portrays four aged residents of Irish nursing homes who, while awaiting death, look back on their lives with a mixture of bitterness and bravado. The two men and two women are Irish through and through: their speech is peppered with enough slang to require a glossary of terms in the program, yet Kinevan's performance style owes more to Kabuki than realism. Clad in a caveman's loincloth, he slithers round the stage in highly stylized fashion that is about an inch away from parody. Kinevan also belts out his lines with largely unmodulated force, striving mightily for dazzling bursts of Beckettian wordplay but falling far short of the target. The poetic desire is there, but the language disappoints and fails.
Watching Forgotten is like watching an impotent old man desperately struggling to make love.
