The Memory of Water review – blackly funny look at sisters fighting for a dead mother’s love

To and fro of emotions … from left: Helen Flanagan, Polly Lister and Victoria Brazier in The Memory of Water. Photograph: Pamela Raith

The three grownup sisters in Shelagh Stephenson’s Olivier award-winning comedy have one thing in common. Forced together by the death of their mother, they each have a child’s neediness. They are divided, however, over what – or whom – it is they need.

What Teresa, the eldest, needs is respect for her devotion, especially as the primary carer in their mother’s final days of dementia. Played by Victoria Brazier, austere and brittle, she is trapped in a narrative of martyrdom, a woman forever convinced she is second-best and overlooked.