It’s called Forgiveness but that’s not the keynote of Jonny Donahoe’s solo show. He calls himself a storyteller but this meditation on trauma, fear and love barely coheres into a story. Forgiveness is too fractured and unresolved for that. You have to respect Donahoe’s refusal to wrangle this raw material, addressing how new parenthood prompted a reckoning with the childhood trauma he had long run from, into a neat narrative shape. There’s a deficit in dramatic terms: the show isn’t always gripping. But you never doubt its honesty, or the hard-won nature of the truths it unfolds.
Donahoe’s tale begins on a trip to San Francisco with his partner, the comedian Josie Long. Long discovers she’s pregnant; Donahoe (a musical comic himself with his band Jonny and the Baptists) has a panic attack, then locks himself in a dark room for a fortnight. Childhood, we learn, has negative connotations for Donahoe: his was blighted by abuse. Memories – some vague, some maybe even unreliable – now refuse to be stifled. Donahoe must tell his story, he says, to make moving on and becoming a father possible.
