Best forgotten

Amnesia? Forget about it. That’s my advice to dramatists considering handling this theme on stage because it always generates the same problem. Memory equals personality so a character without a memory isn’t a character. He’s some clothes. The central figure in The Living Unknown Soldier is a French major suffering from total memory loss after being wounded in the trenches. Early on, the script seems to recognise that its main character is a dud and focuses instead on the search for his family. Adverts are posted and hordes of bumbling French families turn up at the clinic all claiming Major Breakdown as their long-lost son. Here they come, wave after wave of them, crowding into the hospital, plastering him with kisses, pulling off his clothes and trying to find the telltale scar where he hara-kiri’d himself with a bill-hook when he was 11. It’s tedious, repetitive and pointlessly solemn.