Review: MEMORIAM, Southwark Playhouse

It has a premise that borders on sci-fi, but at its heart Memoriam is a family drama. Noga Flaishon’s Papatango-shortlisted play follows Jewish siblings Rachel and David, their grandmother – the last remaining Holocaust survivor – and the way generational trauma both divides them and brings them back together.

Before all this, though, we’re introduced to the startup Memoriam, a dystopian hybrid of Netflix and cryonics, which allows people to have their memories extracted and sold to a streaming service for public consumption – and where Rachel (Rachel Barry) happens to work. In a bid both for financial gain and in service of history, she tries to persuade her grandmother Rivka (Beverley Klein) to sell her memories of Auschwitz.

Her plan receives fierce opposition from David (Ashley Margolis), and Flaishon’s writing sings in the arguments that unfold between them over Passover. What begins with David’s fear of his grandmother’s exploitation eventually exposes longheld tensions over who owns the family’s history, who deserves to be told what, and what responsibility the siblings have over the past. As Rachel and David bicker, the reality of Rivka’s trauma lingers, the elephant in the room.

By far the most compelling and believable character, though, is Rivka herself, a woman whose grief – especially since the recent death of her twin sister, also an Auschwitz survivor – is long buried, and never quite comes to the fore. Klein’s performance is astute, subtle, knowing and occasionally funny, as women with decades more life experience than everyone around them often are.

Elsewhere, though, Flaishon’s humour is too fixated on lazy stereotype – Rachel’s family’s constant questions about her still not being married, or her colleague’s woeful lack of knowledge of Jewish culture. More broadly, there is a sense of artificiality both to the script and to Daniel Goldman’s direction, as though the cast are reading off a list of bullet points, answering all the misgivings someone might have about preserving a Holocaust survivor’s memories.

What happens if the company ends up preserving a Nazi’s memories? What if Rivka’s memories make it into the wrong hands? All are addressed intelligently, but perfunctorily. Flaishon even introduces a character unrelated to the main trio, who is selling her memories of childbirth to Memoriam. We learn little about this woman and the scene adds little, other than inelegantly slotting in the idea that Memoriam can edit any memories it receives, including the removal of any painful emotions.

This clunkiness is not helped by the sterility of Ellie Wintour’s set design, which confines the action to a fluorescent white circle, closer to Rachel’s high-tech office than to any kind of domestic environment. Along the way the creators of Memoriam have become enamoured of the corporate setting, and much emotional weight is lost to jargon invented for the fictional startup. It is only when, in a staggering scene, Rachel experiences her grandmother’s memories of Auschwitz for herself, do we get a sense of the real impact of the technology being proposed.

Indeed, this story might have worked better without one of the family members working for Memoriam. Barry’s portrayal of Rachel sometimes switches too quickly between corporate coldness and empathy for Rivka, and so might have felt more believable as an outsider. Flaishon writes fraught family conflict better than she writes technological satire, and one longs for more scenes set in Rivka’s living room.

Memoriam plays at Southwark Playhouse until 21 November

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