PUBLISHED June 29th, 2017 06:00 am
Founded by Warren Baumgart Jr., Krissy Jesudason and Victoria Mintey, Wag The Dog Theatre, is Singapore’s first English speaking cooperative theatre company. If you’re wondering what that means, cooperative theatre companies stage productions that are selected, funded, produced and performed by the company’s members. Co-op theatre is hugely popular in the UK, US, Canada and Australia giving artists much more control over their work, but this concept is fairly new in Singapore.
Directed by Warren Baumgart Jr. and starring Deborah Hoon, Krissy Jesudason, Victoria Mintey, Mark Seow, Susie Penrice Tyrie and Sean Worrall, The Memory of Water is Wag The Dog Theatre’s inaugural production. In the play, three sisters convene for the funeral of their mother, Vi, who has, in different ways, ruined all their lives. The three each have different memories of the same events, causing constant bickering about whose memories are true.
Running a health food store with her husband Frank, Teresa is an unhappy housewife who feels she has had to keep the family together for years. Mary is a doctor whose five-year affair with Mike, a married doctor, is starting to show strain. She is also obsessed with nursing a young boy suffering from amnesia, and is troubled by visions of her dead mother. Feeling that she’s always been left out, the youngest daughter Catherine is permanently trying to catch her sisters’ attention. As the three women get together after years of separation, their hidden lies and self-betrayals are about to surface.
The Memory of Water was playwright Shelagh Stephenson’s first stage play and it opened at the Hampstead Theatre, London in 1996. Besides winning the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy in 2000, the play was adapted by Stephenson for the 2002 film, Before You Go, starring Julie Walters, John Hannah, and Joanne Whalley.
The title of the play refers to a basic concept of homeopathy, 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.
The comedy arises from the believability of the characters and the situation they are in and they must be played and interpreted in a truthful way. The three sisters are watched over by the ghost of their newly deceased Mother, whose own mind was clinically degenerating by the onset of dementia. This is not just a story about phantoms from the past. There is much dark humour about family life and death.
The Memory of Water by Shelagh Stephenson is running from 30 June to 9 July 2017 at the Black Box at the Drama Centre, National Library. Tickets are available at SISTIC.