Shelagh Stephenson’s ‘The Memory of Water’

Sometimes you just want to go to the theatre to sit back and be entertained. You don’t always need your brain fully functioning just taking on the variously complicated details. The Memory of Water is a wonderful example of a play that mixes both laughter and sadness with outstanding splendour.

Sheila Stephenson’s play is already recognized the world over for high-quality dialogue as has played in the world’s biggest cities for a number of years. Upon reaching the Frank Collymore Hall in Barbados, the Gale Theatre (a joint collaboration between London and Barbados) sees actors from both sides of the ‘pond’ mix well and keep us elated time and time again.

Producer Melissa Simmonds handed over the reins for Thom Cross to direct the 2010 version which brought particularly fine performances from Eddy McKay and Suzan Sylvester along with the brilliant third sister Nailah, Cumberbatch. Drew McKenzie’s character purposely started slow to build up to a great force to be reckoned with.

The play deals with three sisters meeting after the death of their mother. The sisters have a lot in common, yet appear strangely distant. One sister is visited a number of times by their mother which adds to the atmosphere in the theatre. Certainly, while the first half of the play brought raucous laughing consistently, the second half the play is in some ways full of extremely moving moments with many members of the audience shedding a tear because it brought back memories of those they’ve lost themselves.

The dialogue and content of the play did slip into the ‘adult’ range occasionally leading the elderly couple next to me finding somewhere else to go for the second half of the play. Nevertheless the use of adult language was exactly in place as you would’ve expected in such highly strained circumstances.
I enjoyed the quality of the writing so much that I’ll go online with my dear bookshop at Amazon to see if they can send me the full script by return of post.