“The sea. Fifty yards closer. It’ll take the house eventually. All gone without a trace. Nothing left. And all the life that happened here, drowned, sunk. As if it had never been.”
So observes the spectral Vi at the opening of Shelagh Stephenson’s play The Memory of Water, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in this new revival, co-produced by Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse and Bolton Octagon.
Katie Scott’s set, three decades on from Stephenson’s original stage description of a crack in the wall, appears to have moved the house (or rather, its bedroom) right to the edge of a cliff, where its decaying edges suggest that it may hurl itself over the precipice at any moment.
This is a splendid visual analogy for what is to come. In this bedroom we meet Mary, Teresa and Catherine, three sisters whose lives are all teetering on the brink of something precarious. They have come together in their childhood home on the eve of their mother’s funeral, and the failing foundations of their lives threaten to turf each of them over the edge in one way or another.
In this debut play, Stephenson posed a quandary for directors, performers and audiences alike, in refusing to sit neatly in a genre. While there are ways in which she nods in the direction of Ibsen-like psychological drama on one hand and almost Orton-esque farce on the other, the key to success is in treading a very careful line between the two.
Director Lotte Wakeham succeeds spectacularly in this balancing act, allowing the sharply comic dialogue to land on target at every turn, heightening each emotional bombshell as it drops.
As the dead mother observes, her three children are very different from each other, but one thing they certainly share is a flawed, confused and often fabricated memory of their past. Each of them in some way believes they have been hardest done to, and their competitive jealousy pervades every conversation. “We don’t argue, we bicker” insists Mary, and the bickering is almost incessant.
There is very fine casting throughout, but especially in the four women who are the dramatic and emotional heart of the play. Victoria Brazier is the brittle Theresa, perpetually bitter about having been left to deal with the mother’s declining health and waning memory. “If it was up to you two, she’d have to cremate herself” she fumes, although we’re left wondering whether she would want to relinquish control to her siblings.
Polly Lister is Mary, the middle child who lacks the traditional syndrome. It seems that, far from being ignored, she has had rather too much attention lavished upon her for her sisters’ liking, but we eventually learn of the double tragedy that led to this. Lister brings a blunt stoicism to the role, and carries of the tricky feat of delivering many of her lines crisply while recumbent on the bed. Helen Flanagan is really impressive as Catherine, who can easily leap off the page as a source of comedy. How this younger sister of a successful businesswoman and a doctor turns out to be a hypochondriac shopaholic with a string of failed relationships is a mystery to everyone, including her mother. Flanagan certainly raises plenty of laughs with her steam-of-consciousness babbling, but she also succeeds in making us care about this seemingly unlovable character, who is always playing catch-up in the wake of the other two.
So how do you play a dead woman like Vi, who only appears as an apparition to Mary? Vicky Binns answers this in spectral splendor, wafting about the stage in her taffeta elegance while doling out the home truths and dealing brickbats. While the sparks fly between the sisters, the interjections by this matriarch serve both as a grounding rod and as fuel, while her intentional lapses of memory show her complex blend of nurturing and control.
While Catherine, despite an endless list of boyfriends, is unable to supply even one of them to accompany her to the funeral, Teresa has her long-suffering husband Frank and Mary has Mike, with whose wife she operates an awkward timeshare arrangement. Mike is solidly played by Charlie de Melo, and he has the charm to carry off this TV medic’s smooth manner. Frank, in both name and nature, falls to Reginald Edwards, who has the lion’s share of funny lines and funny hats to go with them. The character may appear on paper as a little more than a comic foil, but Edwards fleshes him out well and garners a substantial amount of sympathy along the way.
This excellent revival is as tightly directed and played as it is written, and makes a fitting tribute to the play’s 30th anniversary. Save for a couple of tweaks (references to Phul Nana and Alma Cogan have been discreetly updated) the work sits happily in its mid ’90s setting without showing its age, and is highly recommended viewing.
The Memory of Water is at Liverpool Everyman until 14th March with tickets available here.
Star rating: 4½ stars
Production photography by Pamela Raith
Helen Flanagan, Polly Lister and Victoria Brazier
as Catherine, Mary and Theresa 
Polly Lister and Vicky Binns as Mary and Vi
This review was originally written for publication by Good News Liverpool
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