Review: The Memory of Water (Octagon Bolton)
- All That Dazzles
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
Review by Jack McCabe
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Bolton Octagon, together with Liverpool & Everyman Playhouse, brings a revival of Shelagh Stephenson’s comedy The Memory of Water, 30 years after it was first penned. It is a quietly powerful piece following three sisters who reunite in their childhood home on the evening before their mother’s funeral, focusing on grief, family dynamics, and the subjectivity of memory. With each sister remembering their childhood differently, will this production stick in the mind, or is it one to be forgotten?
Written and set in 1996, Shelagh Stephenson’s text is dated only by the references within the script, the costumes, and the set. The key themes of the play are as relevant now as they were when the Spice Girls were topping the charts. A family brought together through loss, leading to grief, conflict, and humour. It’s an honest portrayal of complicated sibling and parental relationships and how past experiences shape identities into adulthood. The blending of heartbreak and humour replicates what so many will recognise about the process of losing a loved one: that in times of sadness, there is always room for laughter.
Katie Scott’s set and costume design is integral to this production. Given the intimate nature of the Bolton Octagon, the audience is made to feel like they are sitting in the bedroom alongside the characters. It is a perfect portrayal of what an older Northern lady’s bedroom would look like in the late 1990s, and everything from the wallpaper to the curtains to the carpet and the furniture was spot on. The choice to have the carpet not fill the floor was a brilliant one, indicative of the fact that whilst the sisters had lost their mother, she had not yet truly gone. From the moment the sisters reunited in their childhood home, the staging suits the material beautifully, replicating a lived-in and wintry home full of colour.
The costume choices were just as impressive as the set, and they needed to be because this was a production that featured a lot of costumes, and I mean a lot. The main costumes worn by each of the characters reflected their personalities brilliantly. Teresa as the eldest sister and unhappy housewife, Mary as the jaded but logical doctor, and Catherine as the outlandish, confident yet vulnerable youngest. Their outfits were perfectly matched to the way in which these characters were written. A scene towards the end of the first act in which the three sisters tried on the contents of their late mother’s wardrobe was a hilarious highlight, not least because of the costume choices made by Katie Scott.
Away from the reunion of the sisters, there are several subplots, including Mary’s affair with married doctor Mike, Catherine’s longing for commitment from her Spanish boyfriend Xavier, and Teresa’s strained marriage with her husband, Frank. Where a strength of this production lies in the exploration of the sisters’ relationship, the additional subplots feel underdeveloped due to the limited time they are afforded to be explored. In particular, the relationship between Teresa and Frank deserved more space to be discovered, particularly because of how well those two characters were portrayed. The result was the other strands of this production lacking the emotional depth that came with the sibling relationship, and, therefore, the play felt jolted and disrupted when it moved away from scenes focusing on the main focus.
Lotte Wakeham’s direction is strong and immediately informs the audience that this piece is not only a comedy but also a nuanced exploration of loss and the fallibility of memory. She brings emotional sensitivity together with real moments of laugh-out-loud humour with skill. She makes use of the intimate staging and encourages, on the whole, detailed performances from the cast. While some subplots feel constrained by time, the overall approach delivers a thoughtful production.
Victoria Brazier’s performance as Teresa, the eldest sister who bore the responsibility of caring for her mother and organising the funeral, was polished, funny, and heartfelt. She is afforded the benefit of some brilliant one-liners throughout the production, which was a real highlight. She takes the character on a journey from the calm, steady hand of the family to a frantic, lost, and vulnerable woman, finding the process of grief difficult to navigate. She combined comedy with drama excellently and was a pleasure to watch.
Similarly, Polly Lister’s performance as middle child Mary was strong. A doctor obsessed with a patient who is losing their memory with contrasting lives in and out of work. In work, she is knowledgeable, calm, and logical, whereas outside of work, she appears to live a complicated life, in the midst of an affair and longing for a child. Her scenes with her mother, Vi, played by Vicki Binns, were wonderfully performed and moving. Vicki Binns’ role as the mother, Vi, was limited in the first act and grew in the second act. The scenes she featured alongside Polly Lister allowed moments of reflection away from humour.
Before moving on to the final sister, I want to mention the performance of Reginald Edwards as Frank, Theresa’s husband, is a well-intentioned but emotionally drained man who features mostly in the second half. It was a good performance of a role representing the quiet distance that can grow within relationships without communication and understanding. His attempts to manage Theresa when she had decided to drink a lot of whisky the night before the funeral were hilariously performed.
Sadly, a cast is only as strong as its weakest member, and this production was limited by the performance of Helen Flanagan. There was so much potential for the character of Catherine, the youngest sister, desperate for attention from wherever she could get it. She is both outlandish and vulnerable, which creates fertile ground for a nuanced performance, which sadly Helen Flanagan did not provide. The performance felt overacted, over-gesticulated, and with nothing below the surface, which, in the context of a very small cast, had a negative impact on this production. The overacting was distracting and took away from the performances of the rest of the cast. At times, her choices and delivery of lines were funny, but these were unfortunately outbalanced. One of the key themes of this play is grief which requires a careful, measured and nuanced consistent performance from each of the small cast throughout the production.
This revival of The Memory of Water has real moments of quality, beautifully performed by most of the cast, and deals with the balance of humour and drama well. Sadly, a lack of consistency in the cast led to it not fulfilling its full potential and preventing it from managing the delicate theme of grief in a more nuanced way.
The Memory of Water plays at Bolton Octagon until 21st February. Tickets from https://octagonbolton.co.uk/events/the-memory-of-water
It then moves to Liverpool from 25th February - 14th March.
Photos by Pamela Raith