In Shelagh Stephenson's award-winning dark comedy “THE MEMORY OF WATER”, three sisters gather in their mother's house to arrange her funeral. Together, these women (neurotic health food store owner Teresa; Mary, a successful doctor; vulnerable wild-child Catherine; and, not to be left out, the ghost of the mother herself) battle it out using humour, alcohol, dope and their grief to patch together a shared memory of the past.

Director Garry Thomas is excited at bringing this drama to the Riccarton stage. “It’s touching and hugely entertaining. Throughout the play, the sisters struggle over who remembers which events more clearly, only to find that individual memories and experiences can become fuzzy, and that family stories, many times re-told, become free game to be re-shaped and detailed until the story develops so far that it surpasses the memory.”

“THE MEMORY OF WATER” won the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2000 and in a 2004 review, a critic rightly commented, “[Stephenson] unerringly reveals the many ways in which death uncovers the absurd in life.”