Chris Eldon Lee reviews “The Memory of Water”, which is at the New Vic in Newcastle-under-Lyme until Saturday 22nd March 2014
Memory is our most fallible faculty – often deserting us all together as age gets us in its icy grip.
To examine how memory works (or rather fails to) writer Shelagh Stephenson generates a scenario in which three grown daughters gather together one frozen winter’s day to prepare for the funeral of their Alzheimer’s mother. The heightened emotions at that critical life transition tumble out as a collection of interlocking inadequacies and personal blame crises; all providing plenty of rich writing material.
The play is full of first-rate dialogue which, in this new production at the New Vic, is placed in the hands of six first-class actors and a director, Nikoli Foster, who seems to specialise in getting inside the heads of every character he ever comes across.
The wonderful way he weds performers with parts was the most memorable thing about his recent Birmingham Rep production “The Dishwashers”; but here he excels himself. In both cases the lack of any particular plot seems to free him up to develop characters and their relationships without the burden of having to stick to a storyline. The result is an exhilarating evening of exploration and revelation.
The three sisters are gorgeously painted parts.
The oldest, Teresa (Mary-Jo Randle) is in her frumpy fifties; a cosmic, vegetarian, complementary therapist who burdened herself with responsibility for a 75-year-old mother so gaga she put her glasses in the oven.
The youngest, Catherine – played exuberantly by Amanda Ryan – is a hypochondriac, spliff-smoking, shop-a-holic who’s been to bed with 78 men and never been responsible for anything.
Sandwiched in between is the sensible, well spoken and above all realistic doctor daughter, Mary; played with oodles of 40-something sensuality by Carole Langrishe.
They laugh, cry and get high together; remembering childhood events that didn’t actually happen that way and bickering about whether or not they still get on, and what it’s like to be bereaved.
We do meet mother (Lynn Farleigh). The loose floor-boarded set is lit from below and she appears, ghost-like, to reveal that her memory is not a bit like her daughters’. She also describes – with what I suspect is heart breaking accuracy – how it feels to lose your mind to dreaded dementia.
In a play predominantly about women, there are also some very fine male moments, and Stephenson gives every character of either gender a tricky journey to make. She presents the women with a prolonged paralytic scene in which the daughters riffle their mother’s wardrobe like naughty girls let loose with a dressing up box. And there are some very good coffin jokes.
‘The Memory of Water’ may not please everybody (bad language alert!) but I loved it for its sensitive, insightful and, above all, daring handling of how people behave at a tabooed and tormented time of life. I felt I’d been an observer at an exposé, and I really appreciated the way the family counted me in.
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