How does our history get passed on and who is in charge of keeping them alive? Memoriam is a company buying real memories, extracting them and making them available on their software to experience. This is a full body sensory experience of any memory you choose be it childbirth, swimming with dolphins or even piloting a plane. But when the numbers are looking low for next year, top boss Chris (Ben Wiggins) looks to top buyer Rachel (Rachel Barry) for the ‘Premium asset’ she has within her own family.
Memoriam is stark and brutal in the reflection of the human need for content and poses an important question: do we use VR to reflect the true nature of human history’s most horrific moments in order to feel the true scale of the event.
Rachel’s grandmother Rivka (Beverley Klein) is the last living Holocaust survivor and now the last person Memoriam can extract memories from during her time, before liberation. This erupts into fury from her brother David (Ashley Margolis) leaving Rivka in an impossible dilemma. Whether to give up the memories that even she herself hopes to forget.
Throughout this piece we see Rachel pushed to impossible places, twisted between the need to tell her family’s story and the horrible inevitability that this content might be misused. When she herself opts in to ‘dive’ into her grandmother’s memory, Rachel is pulled into a seizure and couldn’t handle the overwhelming pain making the memory unsafe to sell publicly.
I was incredibly moved by this story, it is powerful in its approach and leaves you asking so many questions. The cast is strong, moving passionately through the script that is at times hilarious whilst tackling an immense subject. Barry is a powerhouse as the story develops out of control and leaping her into new territories that we couldn’t have seen coming.
The staging was outstanding, fashionably minimal and immersive. It was a neat bow on top of a stellar play.
I would implore audiences to see this show. It opens a really important questions as the world moves into a more technology focused output of information and in a desperate need to reflect on our past this brings the question of how to we now continue our legacies in an appropriate way.
Reviewer: Alice Rose
Reviewed: 27th October 2026
North West End UK Rating: