MOTHERS, like ghosts in the machine, never really go away.

Shelagh Stephenson's play, The Memory of Water, at the Arnaud this week, explores the relationship between a mother and her three daughters.

The old saying that a son is your son until he takes a wife, but your daughter is your daughter all your life, rings all too true in this gritty but funny piece.

Mother Vi is dead and the funeral draws back together a disparate band of daughters.

Set in Vi's outmoded seaside bedroom, Stephenson strips away the veneer of the women to reveal the girls with all their petty jealousies and fueds rekindled.

Each recalls in a trickle of memories a different angle on that distant childhood, half imagined, half fact.

Teresa (Paula Wilcox) is the practical one, organising the detail of the funeral.

Mary (Lucy Robinson) is the one who made it as a doctor but, like the others, has made a mess of womanhood.

Catherine (Tilly Gaunt), stick thin and anguished over the frailty of yet another lover, is the baby of the bunch.

"She (Vi) thought I was the menopause!" she screeches high on spliffs and self pity.

An unprepossessing bunch, I grant you, but the sparks fly with a harsh and bitterly funny reality, brilliantly played.

Each consciously and unconsciously resents the mother's sway over her life.

Teresa, purveyor of alternative therapies is the one who has had the closest contact with Vi as she has descended into the Alzheimer's abyss.

"Colonic irrigation is not an ideal remedy for Alzheimer's," sneers Dr Mary.

For Vi too, her own identity was slipping gradually away until she felt that she had "holes in her brain".

Common to all is a deep distrust of other women but in truth it is the men who let them down.

Vi's death and the sharing of a flood of hidden guilts and misconceptions is cathartic. The mother's grip is loosened and the daughters must take a fresh look at their lives for which only they now are responsible.

This play is packed with the dark humour so characteristic of Stephenson's native Tyneside.

She puts into words those strange feelings when a simple gesture recalls a mother by turn loved, despised and rediscovered.

Sandy Baker.

The Herald Arts pages are where you'll find the best reviews of a wide range of drama and music each week.