“Thank you for coming to my mid-life crisis” is the parting line David Shopland uses to bid goodbye to his audience after his one-man show, Don’t You Forget About Me. What comes before is a nostalgia-fuelled hour and an homage to John Hughes’ classic The Breakfast Club, but one that turns disjointed and overly sentimental.
Shopland’s spoken word-style script is reflective and contemplative, weighing up musings about growing older and reflecting on what formed your identity in your youth. Shopland makes eye contact with the audience, encouraging them to apply these reflections to their own lives. Sometimes, however, the lines become incoherent and the messages become mixed and muddled. A monologue about films, celebrities, and characters that consumed Shopland’s life generates warm laughter, which quickly tires as it becomes an endless tirade of references.
The structure is disjointed, beginning with Shopland’s character as the sixth, invisible member of the Breakfast Club gang invited into detention on that infamous day. We are quickly jolted from this fantasy though, and brought back into harsh reality as pretences and illusions are shattered. The uneven structure means that the plot involving the Breakfast Club is sculpted and then swiftly abandoned.
Shopland weaves in pop culture references, humming along to Simple Minds’ classic ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ and interweaving references to other John Hughes movies. Relating his experiences to his love of a beloved film, it links to the familiar experience of tying your identity to a piece of media. However, the show feels at once overly autobiographical and disconnected, with the sentimental musings meaning that the story sometimes feels impersonal.
The concept of an imaginary ‘sixth’ member of the gang is creative and could have been better executed, had it developed throughout the show. Shopland’s setting is nostalgic, fit with an 80s banner on the table and books scattered about. He makes use of a minimal set, with chairs that represent each Breakfast Club member. The over-use of moving these chairs however makes for a confusing merging of the characters, which ends up being over-explained in long-winded descriptions — we are being told, not shown.
There is no attempt to come to rash conclusions — rather, we sit with the fact that the messiness and overwhelming chaos of life continues, and it is a part of being alive. However, Don’t You Forget About Me is more of a nostalgic trip than a cohesive personal journey.
Don’t You Forget About Me is running until 31 August at Assembly Roxy. Buy tickets here.
Image by David Shopland, provided to The Student for press use.
