There's nothing like a funeral to bring out the worst in people. In Shelagh Stephenson's play, three estranged sisters with a long history of failing to get on convene to make arrangements for their mother's cremation.
Theresa, the bossy and neurotic owner of an alternative therapy business, is in a particularly bad mood having borne the brunt of the old woman's care. Middle sister Mary was mother's pet but marked her card by falling in with a married man. And the youngest, Catherine, is an emotional disaster area who claims to have slept with 78 men, few of whom came back for seconds.
Stephenson relates the drama to a homeopathic theory that water retains the effects of healing elements long after they have been washed away, as if in memory. In other words, a bottle of the overpriced snake-oil Teresa sells, like an elephant, never forgets.
The metaphor provides a framework for the selective amnesia that occurs when the sisters attempt to interpret their childhood. But in Stefan Escreet's production the mixture of angst and morbid regret too often becomes shrill and hysterical. "We don't argue, we bicker," Teresa states. It's a subtle distinction, but who really wants to listen to two-and-a-half hours of it?
You can't fault the commitment of the acting: Maria Gough has the pained air of a dedicated martyr, Janine Hales is a spectacularly unstable Catherine, and Polly Lister's Mary spends much of the action unsuccessfully trying to get some sleep. But the 1996 piece has begun to show its age, having more in common with Stephenson's years as a writer for Casualty than her more accomplished recent work.
