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Set in the same Newcastle house in 1799 and 1999, the play parallels a physician’s ethical questions about dissection with modern geneticists’ debate over embryo research. A skeleton discovered in the later household turns the drama into a mystery about identity and death.
The story of Mary and her daughters Susan and Janet, who have lived under Billy's physical, emotional and sexual abuse, unfolds through interviews with police and psychologists. After years of abuse, the daughters shoot their father during an epileptic seizure.
Three sisters, Teresa, Mary, and Catherine, gather before their mother's funeral, each haunted by her own demons. The play focusses on how each sister deals with the death and how it directly affects her. The three each have different memories of the same events, causing constant bickering about whose memories are true. As the three women meet after years of separation, all their hidden lies and self-betrayals are about to reach the surface. A theme of the play is, eponymously, memory. The sisters' memories interact with each other, and show that despite synchronicities of time and place they cannot agree upon one unifying experience. This is echoed in Vi's final speech, which portrays Alzheimer's disease as being adrift among a series of islands of your own identity. The sisters drift around their own islands of memory, unable to agree on one particular point, and yet are unified by their familial bond (Vi comments that "some things stay in your bones"). The play exhibits the unity of time, place, and character present in a tragedy, as the play seems to take place at one time, in one space, and without change in the characters' outlooks. However, because the comedy is so often interspersed with the tragic, it may be considered a tragi-comedy.
Set in the same Newcastle house in 1799 and 1999, the play parallels a physician’s ethical questions about dissection with modern geneticists’ debate over embryo research. A skeleton discovered in the later household turns the drama into a mystery about identity and death.
The story of Mary and her daughters Susan and Janet, who have lived under Billy's physical, emotional and sexual abuse, unfolds through interviews with police and psychologists. After years of abuse, the daughters shoot their father during an epileptic seizure.
Three sisters, Teresa, Mary, and Catherine, gather before their mother's funeral, each haunted by her own demons. The play focusses on how each sister deals with the death and how it directly affects her. The three each have different memories of the same events, causing constant bickering about whose memories are true. As the three women meet after years of separation, all their hidden lies and self-betrayals are about to reach the surface. A theme of the play is, eponymously, memory. The sisters' memories interact with each other, and show that despite synchronicities of time and place they cannot agree upon one unifying experience. This is echoed in Vi's final speech, which portrays Alzheimer's disease as being adrift among a series of islands of your own identity. The sisters drift around their own islands of memory, unable to agree on one particular point, and yet are unified by their familial bond (Vi comments that "some things stay in your bones"). The play exhibits the unity of time, place, and character present in a tragedy, as the play seems to take place at one time, in one space, and without change in the characters' outlooks. However, because the comedy is so often interspersed with the tragic, it may be considered a tragi-comedy.