Forever In Your Debt – New Wosley Theatre Ipswich

There are some shows that should just be put down to experience and never spoken of again – Forever In Your Debt is one of those shows – we shall mention it here but lets never speak of it again.

It’s hard to describe exactly what Forever In Your Debt is or, to be precise, what it wants to be. I suppose a play with music comes closest but Foursight Theatre Company’s production leaves you somewhat baffled and more than a bit depressed. Nicole Kidman’s Blue Room may have been described as ‘pure theatrical Viagra’- this is more like pure theatrical Valium.

A family hit by chronic debt seems an apt topic in these credit crunch times and loosely (very loosely) this show follows the tale of one family who, for some unexplained reason) all seem drawn to the roof of the same skyscraper. Teetering on the edge they are coaxed back from the brink by the office cleaner. Sadly this is one of those productions where the brochure blurb is more exciting than the show itself.

One by one each of the family tell of their hardships in song, but after hearing the same tune for the umpteenth time with just a change of lyric you just begin to switch off. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter if the song was catchy or well performed but its sounds more like the wailings of a third rate folk band after too may scrumpy’s.

Therefore the relevance of the disfigured daughter, the moustache wearing other daughter, the cross dressing father and the piano tooting mother just pass you by – yes I said it was baffling.

Despite their hardships you don’t actually care for any of these characters and I use the word Characters loosely as they are little more than thinly drawn stereotypes.

Now not all plays need or indeed should have a happy ending but after 90mins of people throwing themselves off tops of buildings you do need some redemption and this is desperately missing from Forever In Your Debt.

Foursight are an experimental theatre company but this is one show that is in desperate need of The Samaritans. A three quarter empty auditorium gives some impression that this is not going to be a huge hit for Foursight and perhaps in a way they should be grateful for the small numbers – reputation is only as good as your last show and based on this outing they will need to work hard to entice back punters in the future.