Memoriam

Sarah

17 minutes ago

3 min read

★★★

Man crouches and points at an elderly seated woman on a bare stage while a younger woman stands behind, tense and serious. — Photo credit Charlie Flint

I always enjoy theatre that leaves me with plenty to think about on the journey home, and Memoriam certainly did that. Set in a near future where memories can be extracted, edited and sold as immersive virtual reality experiences, it tackles some huge questions around memory, identity, grief and ethics. The ideas are fascinating. The execution? I'm not quite convinced it's there yet.

The play opens with a scene that initially left me feeling rather lost. Perhaps it was where I was sitting, but I found some of the dialogue hard to hear and it took a while to understand exactly what was going on. Once the penny finally dropped and I got my head around the concept, I was fully on board. In fact, I found myself wondering whether there was really any need to keep revisiting that opening character once the audience understood the premise.

The story centres on Rachel, an employee of a company that preserves and commercialises memories. When her grandmother Rivka becomes the world's last living Holocaust survivor, Rachel sees an opportunity to preserve those memories forever. But should memories belong to everyone? And if you can edit memories, soften them or remove the pain attached to them, are they still truly memories at all?

For me, those were by far the most interesting parts of the evening.

The play raises some genuinely thought-provoking questions. Can you retain the truth of a memory once you've taken away the suffering? Do painful experiences define who we are? Is preserving history always a good thing, or can it become exploitation?

When Memoriam leans into those ideas, it's at its strongest.

A scene involving a story about a shoe and the memories it evoked was incredibly powerful. It was simple, moving and said more about the nature of memory than some of the longer debates elsewhere in the script. I found myself wishing there had been more moments like that.

Unfortunately, there is also quite a lot of sibling rivalry and family bickering. Whilst it establishes the different viewpoints, after a while it starts to cover similar ground. The production is advertised as running at 90 minutes, but it was considerably longer and I couldn't help thinking that a tighter edit would really help. There are the bones of a cracking good story here, but it needs to be shorter, sharper and punchier.

I was also left slightly puzzled by Rachel's relationship with her boss David. More than once it felt like he was suggesting drinks/a previous evening in a way that implied something more personal than a simple post-work social, but if that was the intention it never really developed into anything. Equally, David himself never felt quite as dangerous or ruthless as I expected. Given the nature of the company he represents, I wanted someone a little more cut-throat. Even his wardrobe was perplexing. He seemed to exist somewhere between Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and corporate executive, without ever fully looking like either.

The standout performance comes from Beverley Klein as Rivka. Feisty, funny, stubborn and endlessly engaging, she lights up the stage whenever she appears. Rivka gets many of the best lines in the play and Klein delivers every one of them beautifully. The audience seemed genuinely invested whenever she was speaking and it's her scenes that carry much of the emotional weight of the production.

I genuinely admired what Memoriam is trying to do. The themes feel timely, relevant and important. It asks difficult questions and doesn't offer easy answers. But for me, less of the sibling squabbling and more of the powerful memory-based storytelling would make a much stronger show.

There's something really special hiding within Memoriam. It just needs a little more editing itself.