"Who are you when your memories are taken away from you?" This seems to be one of the key-questions of the show "The Memory of Water".

(...) Cecilia Bârbora, Natalia Călin and Raluca Aprodu highlight with charm and a variety of means all the types of humour proposed by the play (linked to situations, retorts, character), as well as the moments of force, of acute laceration, of profound dramatic tension. Three actresses with a fascinating availability for changing the register (joined by the mysterious, calm, restrained, tenebrous - melancholy, slightly imperial appearance of Diana Dumbravă) achieve charming recitals, lessons of prowess in which we can trace both cynical, almost diabolic humour, and devastating emotion".

Răzvana Niță, Port.ro – Memories flowing through our veins      

"...A difficult text, which young director Erwin Şimşensohn has tackled with rigour and his passion for the depths of word".

Mircea M. Ionescu, Dialogues – Three British Sisters

“I confess that, before seeing this most recent show enacted by Erwin Şimşensohn, I absolutely wanted to read the play written by Shelagh Stephenson. Ever since his debut with Yentl, I have understood that for him, the creativity of the directing endeavour matches the creativity necessary in the field of scientific research. Rigour, phantasy and the ability to harmonise all elements making up a system. He knows how to clearly circumscribe the playground, to split the levels through lighting and to use proxemic codes in a justified manner. And in particular, he has the perfect intuition of the major meaning he extracts from the semantic field of the text, in order to bring it to the spectator’s attention. The symbol is essential, and the plastic image can solve almost insurmountable situations.

The Memory of Water made me return to one of the vital anthropological works, the book by Gilbert Durand The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary. In a classical unit of time and space, three sisters, under the impact of their mother’s death, are trying to reconstruct their life. Defining in the text, the invasive proximity of the sea gives birth, in the show as well, to the symbol: Erwin Şimşensohn and scenographer Alina Herescu place at the bottom of the sea, like in a space without exit, what was in the text a mere furnished bedroom in the style of the sixties. The former bedroom of the mother is thus read as a gynaeceum, expression of the feminine force with water as a counterpart (…).

Şimşensohn is the director building with lucidity on the text. He loves and respects the text which he shall endow with flesh and believes in the truth of stories which move. Lucidity does not exclude emotion, but enhances it. It is, I think, the perspective from which he also tackles working with the actors. I was writing, after the premiere from Brăila with Holiday Games, the second show from the „Sebastian Integral” which he intends to create, that he has proven his prowess of lace-worker, handling precious materials – the carefully drawn gesture, the voice exercised for infinitesimal intervals, the gaze focused on the idea and trained to build relationships.

I have not seen so far, in Erwin Şimşensohn enactments, spectacular images dominating the whole, which I interpret as a virtue. He is a director of profound structures, of revealing detail, of the coherence of theatrical speech and first and foremost, of the Truth”. Marina Roman

Translated by Simona Nichiteanu