THE MEMORY OF WATER. To 26 June.
Glasgow/Tour
THE MEMORY OF WATER
by Shelagh Stephenson
Tron, Glasgow 13-29 May
Tue-Sat 8pm Mat 29 May 2pm
Post-show discussion 20 May
then tour to 26 June 2004
Runs 2hr 30min One interval
TICKETS: 0141 552 4267 (Tron)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 30 April at Byre Theatre, St Andrews
Fine acting hampered by production decisions.It's taken 8 years for Shelagh Stephenson's acclaimed first play to trickle north of the border. Muriel Romanes' production, for the Byre, Tron and Scottish women's touring company Stellar Quines, provides hilarious scenes and strong acting. But the play's overall energy evaporates, mainly through inappropriate set-design.
There's an especially strong generation of Scottish women actors around just now. Some of them are here among the three sisters assembling in a stormily windswept coastal home for their mother's funeral. Jennifer Black as mid-sis Theresa, toting a frustrated husband around in her herbal therapy business, and Molly Innes as love-starved, credit-card abusing young Catherine, sick in the midriff and ever-changing mental direction.
With them is Alexandra Mathie's reliable medic Mary, her apparent composure punctured by sleep deprivation and a lover who won't leave his wife. Romanes achieves headily comic results from the scenes between any combination of the trio and the two male partners.
But the play's never before (I've seen four productions) seemed so much a set of contrived hinges for bravura colloquies. A couple of design decisions kibosh the action.
Mother's death-bead dominates the room. Mary's first discovered asleep in it the only rest any of the characters get in their mix of fatigue and hyperactivity. Placing it head-on to the audience creates some interesting groupings, but also leads to forced, unhelpful, ones.
More serious is the decision to go for fragmented realism, with large icy shards interspersed among realistic furniture. The play employs an element of unreality, as Mary Keegan's deceased Vi appears to Mary with recollections reflecting on the young woman's experience - you can never throw off the past.
Vi's appearance from a wardrobe that, at other times, is filled with her old dresses another memory-laden hand-down from the past has metaphorical force in its contrast with the reality around. It's lost when that reality isn't present, and the wardrobe is seen to have no back - of course an actress can slip in there.
So the delicate balance on which the play depends, slips. The Memory of Water still awaits a real first chance in Scotland.
Mary: Alexandra Mathie
Vi: Mary Keegan
Theresa: Jennifer Black
Catherine: Molly Innes
Mike: Simon Coury
Frank: Crawford Logan
Director: Muriel Romanes
Designer: Isla Shaw
Lighting: Natasha Chivers
Sound/Composer: Hilary Brooks
2004-05-09 12:20:07