Voila! Festival Interview: Sarah Hyojin Kim, on Blessed Forgetful

Blessed Forgetful is a physical, devised piece from London-based collective Peculiar Matter, playing at The Playground Theatre on 13 and 14 November as part of Voilà! Theatre Festival. It follows two immigrant artists, Camila and Kay, as they grieve a friend who took their own life, drawing on the early 1900s relationship between Germaine Pichot, Pablo Picasso and Carles Casagemas and on the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Director Sarah Hyojin Kim spoke to Red Bus about the story’s origins, a multilingual rehearsal room, live camera and caring for a company and audience when the subject is suicide.

Red Bus: The show draws on the relationship between Germaine Pichot, Picasso and Carles Casagemas, as well as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. What was it about that early 1900s story that made you want to bring it into a devised piece today?

Sarah Hyojin Kim: At first, I was fascinated by the idea of two people becoming romantically involved after the death of a mutual friend. It almost sounds like a rather juicy piece of gossip about famous artists! But beneath that story, I found something far more complicated: love, obsession, violence and grief.

Casagemas attempted to shoot Germaine after she rejected him, before taking his own life. Picasso, deeply affected by his friend’s death, later became involved with Germaine himself. Germaine reminded me of countless women remembered primarily as someone’s lover rather than in their own right. Casagemas made me think about how isolation and obsession can become dangerously entangled, without ever excusing the violence of his actions. Picasso made me question how we reconcile artistic genius with deeply flawed, sometimes harmful, human behaviour.

I kept wondering how these people dealt with grief. We have far more language and awareness around mental health and loss than people did a century ago, but does that mean we’ve become any better at grieving?

Another starting point was my adaptation of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind during my studies, where I explored the question, “Could love survive the loss of memory?” Mila and I became particularly curious about Clementine’s perspective. As the film largely unfolds through Joel’s experience, we began to wonder what the story might look like through Clementine’s eyes. That curiosity became a driving force in moving beyond the original film and creating something of our own.

As we explored love and memory, I became increasingly interested in another difficult emotion intertwined with both: grief. Ultimately, Blessed Forgetful isn’t about recreating historical figures or retelling a film. It’s about questioning whose stories and grief we choose to remember, whose perspectives are left out, and whether the ways we experience love and loss have really changed over time.

Red Bus: Camila and Kay are two immigrant artists. How much of the show comes from the company’s own experiences, and how did you decide what stayed personal and what became fiction?

Sarah Hyojin Kim: Almost everyone in our company is an immigrant artist, so that shared experience became one of the most immediate ways for us to connect.

In our experience, migration can heighten certain emotions, particularly when we’re trying to find a sense of belonging in an unfamiliar place. Adapting to a new culture can temporarily isolate us or make us intensely focused on the relationships and challenges right in front of us. I saw a parallel between the bohemian artists of early twentieth-century Paris, fiercely pursuing something, and immigrant artists today trying to find their place in an unfamiliar society.

When we encountered the extreme emotions of these historical figures, they weren’t necessarily things we had to understand intellectually. Many of us had experienced feelings of not quite belonging anywhere. It was almost as though our bodies recognised something before our minds could explain it.

Interestingly, the five characters began as fragments of myself and people around me, five different selves I wanted to reach out to and embrace. But these characters were far from complete. Each performer was invited to explore and justify their character’s journey over 60 minutes, filling in the gaps through imagination, discussion and, where they wished, their own experiences. Sometimes they found something deeply personal, and sometimes something entirely unfamiliar. Exploring those connections and differences became an essential part of devising.

Some characters even emerged from unexpected encounters. When my mother, who has nothing to do with theatre, visited me in the UK, I invited her into a workshop. Watching her interact with the performers made me realise that we needed Dive, Kay’s mother, in the story.

Rather than directly reproducing our personal experiences, we used the emotions and questions within them as starting points for fiction. There are now so many fragments of all of us scattered throughout the piece that it’s almost impossible to trace exactly where each one came from.

Red Bus: The show uses English, Korean, Spanish and other languages. How did you decide when to use each one, and what do you hope an audience member who does not speak a particular language will feel in those moments?

Sarah Hyojin Kim: This project began with me, a Korean director, and Mila, an Argentinian performer who has been part of all three of our previous work-in-progress sharings. Many of the amusing and unexpected moments that came from communicating across our different languages and cultures naturally found their way into the piece.

We started by embracing the languages our performers felt most at home in. As the company grew, Chinese became an increasingly significant part of the show alongside Korean, Spanish and English. Developing the piece into a full production for Voilà! Festival gave us an opportunity to explore this multilingual environment more deliberately.

I’ve come to think that understanding someone who speaks a different language can feel like a little miracle. But equally fascinating things happen when we don’t understand each other.

When my mother visited one of our rehearsals, Mila told a story in Spanish about something that had happened on her way to the rehearsal room. My mother doesn’t speak Spanish, yet she seemed to understand the emotional journey and dynamics of the story remarkably well. The funny thing was that she’d understood the actual events almost completely backwards! Mila had been describing how she’d helped a mother and child and felt warm-hearted afterwards. My mother thought Mila had tried to help someone but hadn’t been able to, and was feeling upset about it. I found that moment extraordinary. We can connect deeply with someone’s emotions without understanding their words, while simultaneously constructing an entirely different narrative. That’s something I hope audiences can experience too. Even when they don’t understand every word, they can follow the performers’ bodies, voices and emotional journeys, and perhaps create their own interpretations along the way.

After all, understanding someone’s language and understanding the person aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Red Bus: The piece moves through movement, sound, light, live camera and projection. How did you use the live camera in particular to show the way memories become unreliable?

Sarah Hyojin Kim: Memories don’t always arrive in a predictable order. You might be having a shower when a wonderfully happy memory suddenly comes back to you, or something you thought you’d completely forgotten unexpectedly appears right in front of you.

I wanted to explore that unpredictability, the way memories emerge without warning, through live camera and projection. But I don’t think representing the unreliability of memory necessarily means actively manipulating or distorting an image. The moment we look at something through a camera, we’re already creating a frame. We decide what to include, what to leave out and whose perspective frames the image. Those choices alone can completely change the story we perceive. I think memory works in a similar way. Rather than preserving the past exactly as it happened, we continually reconstruct it through what we remember, what we’ve forgotten and how we choose to look back.

I was also interested in what it means, particularly for a woman, to exist within someone else’s frame, and the social expectations and power dynamics that come with being observed and represented. This connects back to how women’s lives have often been remembered through other people’s accounts.

So rather than using the camera to present a single, definitive version of a memory, I want to invite audiences to question whose perspective they’re seeing, and what might exist beyond the frame.

Red Bus: The show deals with grief after a friend’s suicide, so some audience members may arrive feeling tentative. What did you do in the room, during devising and in the staging, to look after both the company and the audience?

Sarah Hyojin Kim: One of the principles I carry with me from working with David Glass is: “Create a secure space in order to feel insecure.” I believe that to explore vulnerability and emotional uncertainty, we first need to work towards an environment where people feel secure enough to do so. We began our rehearsals with rituals and preparation exercises intended to establish that space.

Throughout the process, we also worked on translating personal memories and emotions into concrete theatrical actions and sensations, rather than asking performers to repeatedly relive difficult experiences. For instance, a memory might become associated with a particular sound, a quality of light or an everyday gesture. This gives performers something tangible to work with, allowing them to focus on their characters’ actions rather than having to reproduce personal emotional pain.

That approach also informed how we considered staging suicide and violence. Rather than focusing on the shock of directly recreating these events, we explored how to translate them into theatrical language and how to represent the experiences of those left behind.

For audiences, we provide content warnings about the themes of suicide, death and grief, so people can make an informed choice about engaging with the work. At the same time, I don’t believe caring for an audience means removing every difficult emotion. But I do believe we have a responsibility to consider how those emotions are presented and to give audiences the space to engage with them on their own terms. What matters to me is not prescribing how audiences should feel. The performers focus on their actions, while the emotional meanings and interpretations remain open to the audience.

Not everyone needs to experience the same grief or arrive at the same conclusion. I hope each audience member can encounter the piece from their own perspective, with whatever emotional distance they need.

Booking details

Blessed Forgetful by Peculiar Matter
Venue: The Playground Theatre, 52 Latimer Road, London W10 6QY
Dates and times: Friday 13 November at 8.45pm and Saturday 14 November at 7.00pm
Running time: 60 minutes
Languages: English, Korean, Spanish and other languages
Content warnings: references to suicide, death and grief; themes of trauma
Tickets: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/theplaygroundtheatre/2278858

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