Heartbreaking and quirky coming-of-age tale is a marvel
Fun Home
Young Vic
‘Daddy, daddy, come here, OK, I need you!” The first words of this quirky, stirring, heartbreaking American musical – staged on Broadway in 2015, where it won five Tonys – are sung (angelically) by a 10-year-old girl.
A plea familiar to fathers everywhere? It’s not every doting dad, though, who performs what Bruce Bechdel then does for his princess, Alison: lie down and let her balance on his feet, so she can imagine, with arms outstretched, that she’s flying like Superman, and see all of Pennsylvania.
Does perform? No, did. Past tense, relived with the added perspective of adult hindsight, the child observed by her older self. Alison Bechdel described Fun Home, her bestselling autobiographical graphic novel of 2006, as “tragicomic”. The resulting theatricalisation (music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron) is suffused with the book’s conflicted, wry evocation of childhood days long gone – even if it doesn’t fully catch the original’s deadpan humour. What it succeeds above all in doing, though, is animating Bechdel’s shrewdly sketched portrait of a father who – that moment of intimacy aside – was remote, then mortifyingly, irretrievably absent.
Bechdel snr, the unsentimental
The little Bechdels gleefully cavort around a casket, replicating the endorphin rush of early, heedless youth
manager of a funeral home (irreverently referred to by his three kids as the “fun home”), led a tense double-life of married rectitude and illicit gay sex, finally stepping out in front of a truck just months after Alison came out to her dismayed parents as a lesbian. As played by Zubin Varla, he’s all strangulated directives and pitiable prissiness – fixated with fashioning an ideal home but incapable of coming out of the closet.
In Tesori’s masterpiece Caroline, Or Change (heading to the West End later this year), “change” has considerable currency; in this comparable marvel you can’t help noticing the word “draw”. The older Alison (Kaisa Hammarlund, watchful through Sue Perkins-ish specs), at her cartoonist’s table, tries to draw out the truth of her upbringing, spiriting into life both that sweetly innocent younger incarnation (on press night, a sensational Brooke Haynes) and also a sexually awakened teenage self (highly assured newcomer Eleanor Kane); different stages of life, different outlooks, in communion with each other.
Sam Gold’s immaculate and emotionally articulate production honours the fluidity of the nimble, springy, conversational score, the band tucked high up either side of a set (by David Zinn) that sometimes offers the fussiest decor, at others a cheerless black back wall.
An obvious charge is that it lacks a host of instantly memorable numbers; the counter is that it reflects experience in all its complexity. One glorious mock Jackson 5 number, in which the little Bechdels gleefully cavort around a casket, replicates the endorphin rush of early, heedless youth, while some of the ballads are like poignant funeral orations: “I didn’t raise you, to give away your days, like me,” urges Jenna Russell’s mournful Helen, the sidelined wife and mother worn spectre-pale by the charade of happy families. A profound evening – suggesting it was never better than when it was all ahead of us, but also that it’s vital to live a life undeceived, and undeceiving. Haunting. Yet fun.
Until Sept 1. Tickets: 020 7922 2922; youngvic.org