The battle between memory and reality Heidi Arena, Catherine McClements and David Roberts in The Other Place. Picture: David Parker Source: Supplied THEATRE The Other Place. By Sharr White. Melbourne Theatre Company. Playhouse, the Arts Centre Melbourne, January 31. JUST how important is memory to our sense of self when our memories are - according to Richard Dawkins - "memories of memories" at best? For that matter, how crucial is a solid grasp of "reality" to an individual's identity? This is the territory of Sharr White's off-Broadway hit The Other Place, presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company with director Nadia Tass projecting a 2-D world on to the stage. Juliana (Catherine McClements) is a brilliant and prickly research scientist who holds the patent for a ground-breaking protein therapy that has the potential to clear plaque from addled brain cells. But at 52, her own brain is betraying her. Indeed, it is her hippocampus - the part of the cortex that helps bed down short-term thoughts into long-term memories - that's failing. Certain she has cancer, Juliana is frustrated by her oncologist husband (David Roberts) who refers her to a neurobiologist instead. Juliana handles the therapy-like inquisition with a trademark mix of sarcasm, impatience and disdainful scorn. The other strand in the play's narrative double helix involves Juliana's attempt to contact her estranged daughter, who ran away at 15 with a grad student. Though his play is stiff, structurally, White has created an authentic heroine: complex, flawed, competitive and deliciously bitchy, especially when this alpha female discovers an omega female in one of her lectures, in a yellow bikini, no less. This is perfect dramatic material for McClements, who can cut an opponent to shreds with her cheekbones. The Other Place is reminiscent of Alan Ayckbourn's personal and affecting play Woman in Mind. The key event in the first act of White's play takes place at a resort on the Virgin Islands, where Ayckbourn's play was written 25 years earlier. Both plays have unreliable, middle-aged, female protagonists. And both writers come from woman-dominated households. White has four sisters. Ayckbourn's Susan is a sweetly vulnerable housewife retreating from the boredom and neglect of her domestic situation. Her re-imagined reality makes her a better and happier person. By contrast, Juliana's delusional "reality" upsets and distresses those around her. The action takes place in an abstract and static space, in the first act, and in front of flat representation of a house in the second. This makes sense semiotically - the world is something that Juliana projects her hyperactive imagination on - but dulls our senses somewhat and exaggerates the mawkishness of Juliana's returns to the family home, the "other place" of the title. Tickets: $33-$99. Bookings: (03) 8688 0888 or online. To March 2