The Memory of Water

Theatre Royal, Waterford

Nothing stirs memories quite like a death in the family, and nobody contests those memories quite as fiercely as sisters.

Such is the dynamic of Shelagh Stephenson’s comic and moving debut play, from 1995, which gathers three siblings in their mother’s northern England seaside home, on the eve of her funeral, an event for which they would behave appropriately, if there was such a thing.

“What do people usually talk about when their mother has just died?” asks Jenni Ledwell’s Mary, a caustic doctor specialising in wisecracks.

The answer, of course, is that they talk about themselves, and the challenge this brings to both writing and performance is how to balance narcissism and a consistently high joke rate without losing sight of personal depth and grief. The most impressive solution of Ben Barnes’s production for Theatre Royal is in its casting.

The sisters here are each so idiosyncratic they turn neurosis into a competitive sport: Ledwell slugging whiskey from behind a pair of Raybans in bed; Tina Kellegher’s fretful and hectoring Teresa zealously pushing alternative medicine or reciting recipes as self-calming mantras; and, most amusingly, Emily Nagle’s Catherine, still the baby of the family at 33, who arrives in a whirl of self-absorption, shopping bags and mild narcotics.

Stephenson is a generous writer, to the point that no characterisation feels less than complete: the carapace of Mary’s humour is allowed to crack, Teresa implodes without becoming humourless and Catherine develops into something more than vampish comic relief while being spared from the horror of self-insight. Ledwell, Kellegher and Nagle expertly negotiate those shifts while Charlie Bonner and Michael Power offer fine support as equally complex male partners. Even the spirit of their mother, Vi (a phantom memory?), has opportunity to remonstrate (“You put words in my mouth,” says Lynda Gough), but the ghost device still feels clunky.

With the precocity of a debut, the play often becomes overcrammed: no motif, plot twist or gag seems to have been refused, and while that makes it brimful of ideas, it leaves Vi’s Alzheimer’s disease or the metaphor of coastal erosion less keenly realised. That explains why Joe Vanek’s set, an otherwise real room, turns a crack in the wall into a yawning chasm, and why Barnes seizes a reference to falling snow as a late, largely unnecessary stage device, as though the production is seeking thematic anchors. Such is anxiety of memory – what do we retain from something as precious and transient as a lifetime or a performance?

Such fears here are ungrounded with a production adept at tracing the counterpoints of Stephenson’s comedy and poignancy with a command that is not easily forgotten.

Ends Saturday