Theatre review: The Memory of Water

Drama school productions are officially classified as amateur dramatics, which I prefer not to review. But as everyone involved is either professional or hoping to be so very shortly, I try to review accordingly.

A case in point - there was a news story the other day about Trevor Nunn directing a student production at ArtsEd; Phillip Breen may not have run the RSC, but he has worked there a few times. For LAMDA he directs Shelagh Stephenson's The Memory of Water, which as the title suggests is a memory play. Although it's less about specific memories than about what memories are and how they work. And how often they don't work - how people who've lived through the same events remember such different things, it puts a question mark over the reliability of our own minds. It's an issue that particularly fascinates Mary (Zoë Goslin,) a doctor who's become fascinated with a young amnesiac, and is ploughing her way through weighty textbooks on the brain. For now, though, she has to concentrate on her own memories for a while, particularly those of her mother, who's just died.