The Memory of Water

Memory of Water

15/3/23

Carlton Players

Winner of the Olivier Award for Best Comedy, Shelagh Stephenson’s poignant and painfully funny comedy is about conflicting memories, life and loss.

Mary, Catherine and Teresa are sisters who think they share a common past. A world of disputed bicycles, midnight ice cream sodas, Mum’s cocktail dresses and perfumed advice a seaside childhood punctuated by the odd monosyllable from Dad. But where does reality end and family myth begin? Why has war broken out in Mother’s bedroom and why is Vi, so recently deceased, still with us?

How should you behave when your mothers just died? There ought to be a Sudden Death Etiquette guide, suggests one of the sisters preparing for their mum’s funeral.  With one sister being a doctor, another an owner manager of a homeopathic remedy business, and the third a drama queen, it is hard to imagine a more dysfunctional family. As they come together in their childhood home, they inevitably clash, criticising each other’s lifestyle choices and memories of their youth. The longer they spend together, the more they reveal of their remembered or misremembered childhood, and come face to face both with their own demons and family secrets bound up with it. It’s easy to forget, as the girls are dealing with their own lives, that they are in fact grieving.

Set in their mother’s cluttered bedroom, the room where she died, we feel that the space is filled with memories. I must mention the inspired choice of the incidental music, ten out often. Over the course of the play, the space clutters and unclutters with what the mother left behind, including her coffin!!

No wonder I’ve got low self-esteem”, the youngest sister, Catherine (Zoe Howe) says as her sisters misremember the name of her latest man, pull her up on her spending, and criticise her attention-seeking. When she is dumped (not for the first time) by phone from her Spanish lover she reverts from bubbly to suicidal, turning to a joint.

The most critical but conversely the most protective of the sisters is the eldest Teresa, (Susan Braddock) drawing the line between blaming her sisters for not being there at their mother’s death and at the same time displaying a maternal concern for her them. Teresa runs an alternative health business with her husband Frank. Being drunk is one of the most diffcult things to pull off, well done you did it. 

The link to homeopathy is an important one. The Memory of Water is a theory in alternative therapy that water ‘remembers’ curative properties even after it has been diluted. This theory is discussed by Mary a doctor (Clare McGrath) and her lover, Mike, a TV doctor and married man. Zoe’s character must deal with grief, excitement about a pregnancy, anxiety for the future with her lover, then a catastrophic revelation. Mary is the tragic heroine of this play and for this reason she alone is visited by the spectre of her dead mother. Lovingly watching over and desperate to defend herself against the incomplete memories of her daughters, Linda O’Brien delivered a strong performance as former party girl Vi turned mother to three daughters bewilderingly different from her.

Though it is the female characters that dominate the play, mention must go to the two male characters Mike and Frank, played respectively by Robert Thunder and Steve Youster, who were not overshadowed by the sisters’ drama but were able to make the characters their own. Mike arrives, frozen and grumpy from a long unheated train. his doctorly detachment and already visible unreliability about commitment to Mary. Frank has one of the funniest lines in the play when telling his very intoxicated wife he no longer wants to sell homeopathic remedies to foreign countries, ‘you try living on goose-fat and pickled cabbage in some emerging democracy while trying to sell them royal jelly’. Hilarious a highlight of the play for me. By the end of the play, the three women’s problems are not solved, but they come to an impasse.

All in all, The Memory of Water provides a couple of hours of good entertainment. The director Brian Dickson and cast make the most of what the play has to offer. After a shaky start, dropped lines, the need for the prompt, the action moved forward to embrace the comic and the tragic.

Thank you for inviting me it was a very enjoyable evening, well done to all concerned.

 

Joanne Rymer

NODA

District 4

 

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