The Memory Of Water at The Octagon Theatre

Three sisters return to their childhood home on the eve of their mother’s funeral in Shelagh Stephenson’s Olivier Award-winning The Memory of Water. Coming to The Octagon Theatre in Bolton this January, a major 30th anniversary revival takes us back to the winter of 1996. The Spice Girls debut album had just been released, unleashing Girl Power on an unsuspecting nation still coming to terms with the bitter disappointment of football failing to come home at Euro ’96.

Returning to their mother’s home in a Northern village for the first time in years, Mary, Teresa and Catherine take stock and reminisce. They sort through old clothes and gather keepsakes while they remember their mother Vi, but as the whisky flows old memories, hidden truths and historic resentments pour out alongside it. The sisters’ memories come into conflict with one other and the play explores the nature of truth, and how the stories we tell ourselves about the past influence our behaviour in the present.

the revival at The Octagon is populated with a cast exceptionally well equipped to locate the comedic beats amongst the tragedy

Laughter comes along with the grief of course — the play won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2000 — and the revival at The Octagon is populated with a cast exceptionally well equipped to locate the comedic beats amongst the tragedy. Director Lotte Wakeham (Artistic Director at Octagon Theatre, Bolton) is joined by a cast that includes Vicky Binns (Coronation Street, Emmerdale) as matriarch Vi, and Victoria Brazier (The Book Thief, Octagon Theatre), Helen Flanagan (Coronation Street) and Polly Lister (Animal Farm, Around the World in 80 Days) as her three daughters.

Stephenson’s play is regarded today as a modern classic and in 2002 it was turned into a film titled Before You Go starring Julie Walters and directed by Lewis Gilbert. The revival in Bolton takes us back to a time of Cool Britannia, the final days of John Major’s Premiership, just a few short months before Tony Blair would ride into office on a wave of optimism — but The Memory Of Water also provides a steady counter to the popular narrative, presenting an unvarnished, and yet comedic, portrait of the lives of four women living in Northern England.

The show opens on Thursday 29 January and runs through to Saturday 21 February and is staged thanks to a collaboration between The Octagon Theatre and Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse. This marks the reteaming of two of the North West’s leading producing theatres, following on from a successful partnership which presented Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors in 2022.