Drought on Stage in the St Andrews Play Club Production, ‘Memory of Water’.

Memory of Water
By Shelagh Stephenson; directed by Wendy Quinault; sets by Alan Tricker; costumes by Sheila Terris. Presented by ‘The St Andews Play Club’ at the Byre Theatre in St Andrews, Fife, 12th-21st of November 2009. Attended performance on Thursday the 19th of November, 7.30pm in the A.B. Paterson Auditorium.
WITH: Moira Caton (Vi), Margaret Thomas (Mary), Janet Richardson (Teresa), Nathalia Smith (Cahterine), Kenny Lindsay (Frank) and Gary Thompson (Mike).



Three sisters, two passive husbands and one dead mother form the core of Shelagh Stephenson’s premier stage play, ‘Memory of Water’. The funeral setting is the perfect excuse for outrageous behaviour, abusive comments and heavy nostalgia. The fractious relationships are conducted in Mother Vi’s old bedroom which is literally cracking under the weight of the secrets shelved within. The women wade into the past and desperately battle to become anything but their mother.

Mary is joined at the family home by the bitter Teresa and wild child Catherine. The three women tussle over petty childhood issues and incessantly blame each other for their own misfortunes. As they drown out their grief by consuming more wine, they unlock painful home truths of teenage pregnancy and abandonment. Not even the presence of the male other halves can lift the girls from their stupor. Instead they seek solace by exploring their mother’s wardrobe and making hilariously inappropriate casket jokes.

With such juicy subject matter at their disposal it is a shame that the play begins slowly, trickling into existence as the St Andrews Play Club fail to engage with Stephenson’s buoyant and witty script. Despite having little acting competition, Nathalia Smith fails to impress as the hypochondriac sister. She maintains a strangely high pitch of voice throughout which makes the delivery of every line sound defensive and surprised. She grated on my patience and although the St Andrian OAPs in the audience found her quips about cannabis chuckle worthy, I remained embarrassed and disturbed by her representation of the twenty something generation.
As well as Quinault’s direction, the costumes were decidedly miss-matched and incoherent with the target era. The skull and cross bones wife beater, worn by Catherine, sparks of a costume designer that is out of touch with current fashions and Teresa’s gypsy costume was so outrageous that I hardly noticed the difference between her conservative funeral attire and her mother’s costume dress.

With no allusion to a father figure in the plot, the male counterparts struggle to inject any notion of masculinity into the performance. Kenny Lindsay plays Frank as a camp shadow of a man. He rolls his eyes, prances across the stage and reacts melodramatically to any disgraceful behaviour. The snide and unhelpful comments lose their comedic value when Lindsay begins to anticipate the audience’s laughs.
The exception to my criticism is awarded to Margaret Thomas (Mary). Her comic timing and natural fluid movements about the stage soak up the leaky discrepancies of her fellow actresses and save the play from being deemed frightfully amateur. The production succeeds when she alone reflects on her childlessness and her impossible relationship with a married man. She embodies the tragicomedy that makes this play hilarious and chilling.

I would rather this enactment was not etched into my long term memory reserves. Good enough for a cheeky matinee audience if accompanied by a refreshing cup of interval coffee but not enough to quench the thirst of a theatre aficionado.