In this play by Shelagh Stephenson, three squabbling sisters reunite for their mother’s funeral in this comic tale of inter-family relations. The play underscores how subjective memories can be: different people remembering different things and/or remembering the same events but often differently.
The three sisters in question are Mary, a doctor, desperate for her married lover of five years, Mike, to leave his wife so she can have a child of her own; Teresa, capable and controlling, left to look after their mother while also running a health-food business with her husband Frank; and Catherine, attention-seeking, desperate for love and burdened with low self-esteem. The other woman that features in the play is Vi, their mother, who we learn was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease before her death, but who we first see at the beginning of the play as a ‘sexy, immaculately made-up’ 40-year-old woman in a cocktail dress.
The interaction between the three sisters is often comical and sadly, highly relatable. What comes to the fore is how different their memories are of their shared childhood. For example: Catherine is convinced that Vi had their cat put down. Mary assures her the cat just died, while Teresa points out it was run over by a combine harvester.
The play posits the idea that our memories consist of our own particular version of past reality. What we remember, and how we remember it, has a lot to do with how we see ourselves. We adapt our memories to our own narrative of self. Catherine, convinced she was an after-thought and that her mum didn’t like her, remembers an unhappy childhood, and is accused of appropriating an unfortunate event that happened to Mary because that better fits her own narrative as the forgotten child of the family.
The one memory all three daughters seem to have in common is that Vi would not have won any ‘Mother of the Year’ awards, refusing to instruct them in the ways of the world, thus informing Mary that a box of sanitary towels was a home perm kit, and as Mary notes ‘She’d have sent us up K2 in slingbacks. With matching handbags.’
In Act 2 we get to see another side of Vi: an attractive woman who enjoyed the company of men. We also see Vi chastise Mary for her children’s memories of her. ‘You put words in my mouth….. My comedy mother. My stupid, bigoted, ignorant mother.’ Vi points out that whereas her children remember the holidays they didn’t go on and the presents they didn’t get, they forget all the things she did do for them. As a result, her memories of their childhoods are the polar opposite from theirs. Moreover, Vi remembers how, as adults, her children had no patience for her and cut her out of their lives, hence her resentment towards them. A resentment combined with an envy of all the opportunities and experiences her daughters could enjoy and take for granted, but which for women of her class and generation would have been out of reach.
One of the most heart-breaking speeches in the play is that of Catherine when she explains her fear of being left on her own. It lays bear the low self-esteem of a young woman who uses sex as a way of validating her self-worth; who accepts being treated badly by men because she fears loneliness, and she lacks the tools and a sense of self-worth to demand better for herself.
Of course, her sisters’ reaction may seem shockingly nonchalant to an outsider, but presumably its their way of coping with a demanding sister year in year out, acutely aware that their sister is an emotional vacuum that can never be sated.
It would seem Vi’s presence is like the memory of water that Mary mentions early on in the play. ‘You can dilute and dilute and dilute, but the pertinent thing remains. It’s unseen, undetectable, untraceable but it still exerts influence.’
