Memories are tricky; our images of the past are constantly changing because we remember not the event or person but our last memory of them. Throw dementia into the equation, set it a little in the future and we have the fascinating premise on which Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime is based. If losing memories is painful, how much more painful is perfect memory?
There are many threads to this story, plenty to keep you discussing the ideas later over a glass of wine. What does it mean to be human? Should we not celebrate our luck in having a great love and not mourn its ending? When is one in one’s “prime”? Or is that a question only those who know us can answer? How do we determine what is real? And as the song says – if you had the chance to do it all again – would you? So many questions and in 80minutes one might think this could become a rat’s nest of ideas. Except it doesn’t.
Both the script for Marjorie Prime and this production of it are delicately efficient and provocative (with a twist to the end which is most unexpected) and are played out with finesse by the four stakeholders. Maggie Dence uses levity to differentiate between the real, delightful Marjorie and the Marjorie Prime, so that we understand that an essential aspect of being human is our sense of humour. It is a finely nuanced performance from this master of the Australian stage. As Jon, Richard Sydenham gives a very authentic performance of a man attempting to deal with the many issues of the play. His love, compassion and patience pull at the audience’s sympathies.
Lucy Bell’s Tess competently expresses some of the despair women feel when having done everything according to society’s demands all their life realise, too late, there is no pay-off or reward for always doing the “right thing”. Every day, “repeat, repeat, repeat”. With delicious irony, society asks Tess that she function like an automaton when she is human. Her pain at realising her mother’s happiest time was before she was born did not resound through the space. The moment somehow was lost. It needed time to breathe.
Jake Speer’s 30 year-old Walter is a “Prime”, a next-level holographic-android 3D projection of Marjorie’s late husband, recreated in his handsome 30s; a creation that can appear and move around the place like a very solid-looking ghost. His personality software is constructed both from what he left behind and from memories of the people 
close to him. Whenever Marjorie reminds him of a trait, or a shared experience, his Prime says, “I’ll remember that now.” Programming Walter (and later Marjorie) begins to resemble the heartbreak that many carers of dementia sufferers have to go through: having to teach their elderly loved ones who they were and are. Ah! More irony.
This is a gentle play set elegantly by Simon Greer (Designer) in the tiny space of the Ensemble in a sort of mid-century modern which has to serve another play opening at the Ensemble – Unqualified. Greer’s work creatively strikes exactly the right sort of note for both plays. He has a remarkable eye and sensibility for design.
Director Mitchell Butel has served the playwright well, highlighting Harrison’s philosophical issues concerning memory and identity. Marjorie Prime has a sort of Chekhovian feel, and Butel’s approach allows us all to bring our own life experiences to the play before going home to the aforementioned glass of wine – where we can toast to the future.
And reconstruct our lives through memories to be what we wanted our lives to be, not what they are. Or were.
Kate Stratford – On The Town
