As they say on televise, this play contained strong language from the start - but nobody switched off for HIADS' latest production of The Memory of Water by Shelagh Stephenson.

Eric Dosetter, who directed Travesties, HIADS' very first play at the Station Theatre, was back again with another most memorable, meaningful drama. Voted winner of the Olivier Award for Best Comedy in 2000, this is about our post feminist pickles in the 21st century.

Though the plight of the characters was more Bridget Jones, the play began with shades of Noel Coward's classic comedy Blithe Spirit with its 50s furniture and resident ghost in flowing, 50s outfits. She was recently departed matriarch Vi, played by Yvonne Hawley.

Like all passed-away parents though, she had gone but was still part of the furniture, holing the key to childhood memories, knowing where to find the tell-all tin of family secrets, even getting into a posthumous family photo when her three daughters come for her funeral. Yvonne revelled in this part of the lady for whom death was a happy release from Alzheimers. Now she is a ghost, she can again dance in rayon and crimplene couture and relieve the rapture of appreciative glances from the gents! Sadly she also sees how her daughters never knew her and certainly never learnt from her cause of the generation gap, actually a generation crevasse, in these do-your-own-thing days.

One could write a book about each one of those daughters, played with electric excellence by Kat Wonton, Linda Macdonald and Fiona Venison. Their mood wasn't to mourn their mother but to moan, mock and run her down, tearing each other apart at the same time of course.

First on the scene was Mary, who wakes up in mother's bed fearing to face her scatty sisters, boosting her confidence with a half-bottle of whisky. In the part Kat gave a performance of many intense and sensitive layers, being the cleverest daughter, the most vulnerable, closest to mother and with most to hide about her childhood. On the surface she was a successful doctor, but she was actually fixated over an amnesiac you male patient and screwed up in an unprofessional affair. This was Mike, played with assurance by John Blackwell.

Slowly she comes to realise that she was doomed to be the perpetual 'bit on the side', living a life of lonely weekends and lonelier Christmases, sandwiched between adulterous yuck when lover boy had a bit of time off.

Next was Theresa, Linda Macdonald, a health food freak married to a health food business failure, feeble Frank, played with suitable detachment by Andy Wharton. Linda powered round the stage organising and ordaining, saying that everything tasted of salt, bingeing on veggie and herbal remedies.

Finally came Catherine, uninhibited drop-out, deliciously played by Fiona Vinson, provider of the pot, swanking about her 78 lovers, yet still hanging on the phone for the love of her live in Spain. Fiona's kaleidoscopic coup of a performance boiled over into bouts of self pity and wonderful walk outs, favourite being the one which ended in the wardrobe.

Individually these acts were dynamite, but on stage together the ensemble was more like those much sought after weapons of mass destruction when these talented young actors expressive with brisk and risqué dialogue eyeballed the audience, a searing model of today's immoral maze.

The Memories of Water exposed the true and tacky and tragic condition of so many modern women betrayed by the flawed freedoms promised by women's lib. But what fun it was!

Vic Pierce-Jones

Hayling Islander