• About the Author
• Water Memory
• The Concept of Water in the Play
• Family and Memory: A Tale of Three Sisters
• Reactions

About the Author

Shelagh Stephenson was born in 1955 in Northumberland and read drama at Manchester University. She is the author of several radio plays written for BBC Radio, including Darling Peidi, The Anatomical Venus and Five Kinds of Silence (1997), which won the Writer's Guild Award for Best Original Radio Play. Her first stage play, The Memory of Water, which opened at the Hampstead Theatre, London in 1996, won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy. Her second stage play, An Experiment With An Air Pump, was joint winner of the 1997 Peggy Ramsay Award, and premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 1998.

Ancient Lights was produced at Hampstead Theatre in 2000, and in 2002, Mappa Mundi opened at the Royal National Theatre. Her latest play, Enlightenment, opened at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 2005.

In an interview with Robin Usher on the evening of the Australian première of the play, Stephenson commented on the creative process and the reception of her work as follows:

"I've got this tragic flaw that makes everything come out funny".

"I certainly wasn't feeling hilarious, when I wrote it because it was soon after my mother's funeral."

"People like it simply because the play is about mothers and daughters… The success came for me as a total surprise."

"I don't think I even thought of writing that at first. It came out of a conversation in rehearsal […]." (on suggestions that she made conscious references in the play to Woody Allen's film Hannah and her Sisters; some people have dubbed The Memory of Water as Shelagh and her Sisters)

Water Memory

The play's title refers to a basic concept of homeopathy, according to which water is capable of preserving a "memory" of particles dissolved in it. This property allows water to retain the properties of the dissolved substance, even if it is no longer chemically traceable in the solution. Although mainstream academics dismiss the theory as pseudoscience, it is still influential in alternative medicine.

In recent times, the theory was most prominently advocated by the French immunologist Jacques Benveniste (1935-2004) who claimed to have proved water memory in a laboratory experiment in 1988: a homoeopathically diluted solution of antibodies was reportedly able to activate white blood cells without relying on a chemical reaction. However, other scientists were not able to replicate Benveniste's experimental success, thus calling his academic reputation into doubt.

Mary's lover Mike indirectly refers to the Benveniste affair in the second half of the first act: (…) they were doing these experiments with water, because they were researching the efficacy of homeopathy, and what they came up with (…) was that you can remove every last trace of the curative element from a water solution and it will still retain its beneficial effect. And they decided that this meant water was like magnetic tape. That water had memory. You can dilute and dilute and dilute, but the pertinent thing remains. It's unseen, undetectable, untraceable, but it still exerts influence. The immaterial effect of memory, its loss or manipulation on the development of each family member remains an omnipresent subject throughout the play. Vi suffered from Alzheimer's disease, Mary's mysterious patient from amnesia. Recalling their common childhood, the sisters find that their own memories have only preserved a biased version of actual events, falsified by a selective suppression of traumatic recollections or even, as in Catherine's case, a fabrication of false remembrances. Stephenson uses the homoeopathical theory of water memory to illustrate the notion of memory as a conducting device that preserves the impact of a concrete impulse long after its source has passed from its material being. In the same manner, Mary finally accepts that the influence Vi exerts in her daughters' lives will outlast her physical existence by far: My mother's the ghost in the machine. She goes through us like wine through water. Whether we like it or not. Nothing ends entirely.

The Concept of Water in the Play.

"You can remove every last trace of the curative element from a water solution and it will still retain its beneficial effect. And they decided that this meant water was like magnetic tape. That water had memory."

Although she is no longer there, the mother's effect on each daughter can clearly be seen; she is the ghost in the machine, who goes through them like wine through water. Each daughter may be compared to one of the three states of water: Teresa, the eldest, is set in her ways and in a fixed, but loveless marriage, cold and hard, like ice. Mary, as the middle daughter, laconically takes up the space afforded to her, much as liquid water fills any container it is put into. She leads a fluid, undetermined relationship with a married man. The youngest daughter is Catherine, loud and effervescent in her attention-seeking but usually ineffective, like vaporous steam.

All three daughters together form a complex unit through which the themes of childhood, memory and familial relationships are released into an emotionally charged, pre-funereal vacuum.

Family and Memory: A Tale of Three Sisters

Three sisters? Chekhov? King Lear? The Greeks? Indeed. The scene is familiar. The death of a parent brings a family together - with all the conflicts such a reunion entails. In recent years, the Tübingen Anglo-Irish Theatre Group has produced two plays with this fundamental constellation; Anne Devlin's After Easter (2001) and Bernard Farrell's Lovers at Versailles (2004). Dominant parents are shown to exercise influence, sometimes even from the coffin. The plays are about the past's grip on the present, and on the coming to terms of siblings with the demise of their parent - and with each other. That can find expression in straight drama (Devlin), in comedy (Farrell) or in tragicomedy, as in Stephenson's The Memory of Water, with its reference to Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters.

"I hated Hannah and Her Sisters. I hate Woody Allen." Frank, husband of the oldest sister Teresa, is provoked to this outburst by his wife's drunken revelations. He may despise Allen's classic movie, but what he really seems to hate is a life built on lies (his relationship with Teresa began with a date on which he pretended to like the movie).

The familiar dramatic territory of inter-family strife in Stephenson's play focuses on three sisters who have gathered in their old seaside Northern English family home in the wake of their mother's death. On the surface, Teresa who runs a successful health food business seems content with her second marriage; Mary is a vaguely discontented successful doctor in a relationship with an equally successful lover, Mike, who is, alas, married. Catherine is the youngest and most immature of the sisters. She binges on shopping for inappropriate clothes, hopeless love affairs, and drugs. Trapped by a snowstorm in the hours before their mother's funeral, the thirty-something sisters bicker incessantly over conflicting childhood memories, sniping at each other and haranguing each other over old grudges. Resurrecting decades-old arguments, their different and often distorted memories compete for authenticity. Who was it was left at the beach? Who ate the hash cookies? And who was watching The High Chaparral?

"All memories are false, yours in particular," Mary tells her sister Teresa. Beyond being a tight-knit, dramatic comedy on the psychological impact of family relationships in "this typically dysfunctional family" (Mark Lambert), The Memory of Water is also a study of the nature of memory and its existential limitations. It engages with such fundamental questions as what stories we tend to tell ourselves in order to avoid responsibility for our failures and the pain we have caused others, and how we sometimes unknowingly falsify our memories and alter the stories of our past. It also shows, so Agnieszka Glinska (who directed the play in Poland), "how we often adopt the stories of others and make them our own because they 'fit' with our personality."

Mark Lambert, who acted in the London premiere in 1996 and who directed the Dublin premiere of the play in 2001, explains:

Shelagh wrote the play not long after the death of her own mother and the play was inevitably heavily influenced by this, and her own sisters; although she insists it is not biographical in essence. She was, I think, fascinated by the effect the death of a parent can have on a family, how it throws everything into a new and different perspective making each and every one of us re-evaluate our lives in some way or other.

Each sister brings their own individual problems and obsessions into the room, suffer a crisis of varying degrees, learn more about each other and themselves and are changed in some way by the end of it. They remember the past in ways that suits their own vision and state of mind, looking for someone to blame or something to make sense of their lives and their disappointments.

Focusing on female relationships, the exchanges between the 'ghost' of the mother and her daughter Mary are at the core of the play. "You invent these versions of me and I don't recognize myself," the dead woman tells her daughter. In a heated argument at the end of the first scene of Act 2, the exasperated daughter asks her mother: "Have you finished?" "Never!" is Vi's answer, just before the blackout. The presence of the parent is physically palpable. Their conversations are, in Mark Lambert's words "a necessary part of the healing process of death and should of course have taken place before the mother died. They talk like they never talked when she was alive and learn about each other and confess their disappointments and desires in ways that are deeply cathartic."

Teresa, Mary and Catherine go through a rollercoaster of emotions, from heartbreaking sorrow and pain to hysterical and hilarious laughter. They sort through their mother's clothes in front of the mirror, in turn appalled and amused by what they see, and when one of them says to another, ''You look dead like Mum,'' they collapse laughing. After all, Mum, at that very moment, is lying in state in the local funeral parlour. This collapse into gallows humour encapsulates perfectly "what normal people do in abnormal times," as Mary says early on. It is what often happens in the face of a death in the family: words fail, emotions short-circuit and the only proper response seems to be laughter.

Shelagh Stephenson's play does not break new ground. It is, as Mark Lambert has observed, "classic in its format from the Greek classics, to Shakespeare to Chekhov.

Where there are sisters, there are always three. Here it is the same, and the dynamic between Mary, Teresa and Catherine can be compared to their illustrious predecessors. Like the Fates of Greek mythology, the sisters take on the roles of Maiden, Mother, and Crone.

Catherine in her drug-fuelled insistence on never growing up is the Maiden. Teresa in her attempts to control and interfere in the lives of all those around her is the Mother. Mary, who bemoans her barrenness, yet deliberately chooses it in the man she loves is the Crone.
They are the daughters of Lear frantically seeking a parent's approval while rejecting that same parent simultaneously.
They are Chekhov's Three Sisters wistfully looking for a way out of their present dilemma but not really doing much about it. Much like Olga, Masha and Irina wanting to go to Moscow, you get the feeling little will change in the life of these three.
They are also instantly recognisable, credible real women who would not be out of place in any contemporary city.

Other possible comparisons include Hannie Rayson's Hotel Sorrento (about the three Australian Moynahan sisters), Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, but also the women in Lorca and Laura Esquivel.

It is the nexus of family and memory, and the balance between black humour and pathos, which marks out Stephenson's "wickedly funny and moving" (The Independent) take on the three sisters. The Memory of Water proves the old adage that there's nothing like a funeral to bring a family closer together or drive them all straight to hell!

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