When we need new plays, why revive this?
The Memory of Water Hampstead Theatre, London NW3 ★★★★★
It’s a homecoming for Shelagh Stephenson’s play, which premiered at the Hampstead in 1996, and for her characters: three sisters who return to Yorkshire for their mother’s funeral. Though it won Stephenson an Olivier Award for Best New Comedy, it’s really an old-fashioned melodrama – and a shaky one at that.
The reunited trio are three extreme types. There’s oldest sister Teresa, responsible, controlling and selfdenying, who sells health supplements; arrogant Mary, who became a neurologist and fled her family; and attention-seeking, infantile youngest Catherine, who seeks affection in the arms of unsuitable men.
Stephenson was inspired by her own mother’s funeral, which exacerbated existing tensions, and you can sense that authentic experience. Unfortunately, it’s cheapened by the addition of sitcom zingers, clumsy plotting and tortured metaphors.
The concept of fallible memory, and how differing views of the same upbringing might shape us, is interesting when it’s allowed to play out through the clashing worldviews and festering resentments of the siblings. There’s also a poignant thread about how the loss of memory affects our sense of self; their mother, Vi, had Alzheimer’s.
But Stephenson can’t resist hammering her theme home with constant overt references and ponderous analogies, which drag out the running time past endurance. “All memories are false,” claims Mary right at the top of the play, and so it continues. She just happens to be treating a patient with post-traumatic amnesia, and we also hear about a lab experiment that showed water retains its beneficial effects after months of being used to dilute – essentially, water has memory.
In fact, as if not trusting its audience’s recall, the play tiresomely restates the same points of conflict via relentless bickering. It’s a relief when two male characters join the action: Mary’s married lover, Mike (Adam James), and Teresa’s husband and business partner, Frank (Kulvinder Ghir). Both are very funny as they survey – and are ground down by – this bedlam: Mike’s rakish charm curdling, kindly Frank losing patience. “It’s worse than the Borgias,” sighs the latter. But it’s probably not a great sign that I longed for them to escape.
Even if they give necessarily broad performances, Carolina Main has some amusing moments as Catherine, like sobbing ostentatiously into a sandwich, and Lucy Black brings real savagery to Teresa’s drunken diatribe. Though a hammy device, the richest dynamic is between Laura Rogers’s shellshocked Mary and her conjured late mother, Vi (a brittle, compelling Lizzy Mcinnerny). Alice Hamilton’s overwrought production stills for their loaded exchanges. The storm clouds gathering overhead in Anna Reid’s design are too on the nose, and Vi’s chintzy bedroom feels appropriately stifling.
The revival is part of the venue’s 60th anniversary season, but Stephenson’s was hardly a neglected piece; Nottingham Playhouse did it just two years ago. Nor has it aged well. Surely there are stronger and fresher plays, as well as emerging female talent, that deserve to be championed in this new-writing theatre – particularly post-pandemic, when we need new life on our stages.