Directed by Agnieszka Glińska, Dramatyczny Theatre, March, 2002.
Once again Agnieszka Glińska brings Chekhov to the stage. This is no mistake, for although Pamięć wody / The Memory of Water was written by Shelagh Stephenson, the story of the play is a distant echo of the great Russian's texts. The main characters, three sisters, await the funeral of their mother. They are complete strangers to each other and are linked only by the past. They begin to search through their collective memory, but is the past enough to revive the bond between them?
This production of what is a well-groomed, almost filmic script features Jolanta Fraszyńska, Małgorzata Niemirska, Agnieszka Pilaszewska, Piotr Bajor i Sławomir Orzechowski.
The Memory of Water is a play about how immensely unprepared we are for the death of someone close, how little immunity we have to pain, how susceptible we are to moments of crisis. It is also a play about memory, about how we sometimes unknowingly falsify our memories and alter the stories of our past. It also shows how we often adopt the stories of others and make them our own because they 'fit' with our personality. Then we believe that is how things really were. The sisters in the play reminisce about the years they spent together. But something is not quite right. Each of them remembers something different. It is as if they remembered not a single childhood, but three different ones. (Agnieszka Glinska in an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza)
Shelagh Stephenson, Pamięć wody / The Memory of Water, translated by Elżbieta Woźniak, directed by Agnieszka Glińska, music by Olena Leonenko, scenery designed by Magdalena Maciejewska and Agnieszka Zawadowska. Premiere: March 23, 2002 at the Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaw, the Small Stage.