Domestic musical is a down-to-earth delight
Theatre This Is My Family Minerva, Chichester
★★★★★
It doesn’t have tap dances or showstoppers. It doesn’t have a miner’s lad bravely pirouetting past the pits, or a Caribbean orphan revolutionising early American politics. Tim Firth’s This Is My
Family ranks among the most down-toearth, close-to-home musicals ever.
It does what it says on the tin. It invites you to spend a few hours with a family – an ordinary, relatable one caught at a moment of familiar pressure: that point when children are emerging into adulthood, and their parents are forlornly diverging as they contemplate sacrifices made, the years left, the hopes unfulfilled. And all that gets bundled into the fraught scenario of a tempestuous camping trip.
When I first saw it in Sheffield in
2013, this unalloyed delight, by turns funny and heart-rending, transformed my appreciation of Firth – assisted by faultless direction from Daniel Evans, who now revives it (with no less expertise, and a sterling cast, featuring 86-year-old Sheila Hancock) to launch the summer season in Chichester.
For the past three decades Firth has carved out an unfashionable but lucrative niche as a staunch populist, good with comedy, Ayckbournian in his eye for suburban pathos. He knows how to put bums on seats – witness Neville’s Island (1992) and his spinoffs to Calendar Girls. Yet for all his finesse, I admired the craftmanship while yearning for more distinctive personal investment. He has talked about how the domestic material dictated the piece’s musical form (with skipping rhythms, nagging
refrains, speech breaking into piping song, song subsiding into speech), as if the show wrote itself. And it feels as though Firth is involved, inside-out, with his characters. He somehow gives us archetypes and stereotypical dynamics, yet fully realised people.
James Nesbitt plays the fall-guy father – sheepish Steve – a figure of easily wounded masculine pride; his bumbling DIY endeavours and parental overtures meet with much cold-shower disdain from wife Yvonne, a nicely arms-folded yet sympathetic Clare Burt. Mooching in the attic of Richard Kent’s doll’s-house set, lanky son Matt (Scott Folan) has retreated behind goth make-up and muttered monosyllables that his discreetly caring parents still translate as surreptitious cries for help.
This motley crew is augmented by Yvonne’s bawdily entertaining sister Sian (Rachel Lumberg) and her derided mother-in-law, Hancock’s touchingly frail May, whose slipping grip on reality is evoked by her faltering way with the words of an old hymn. Hancock’s vulnerable warble reinforces the evening’s cracked charm: Evans lets his cast feel at home in their own voices – forgivably fallible in Nesbitt’s case – and there’s something of the humble school orchestra about the show’s sound.
Roping everyone into a holiday won in a competition, the show’s presiding spirit, daughter Nicky (Kirsty Maclaren), tries to hold it all together, wanting her brother to lighten up and her folks to rekindle their former ardour by revisiting their very soggy courtship grounds.
Much more than this doesn’t need saying – except that while Chichester’s big musical offering this summer is Oklahoma! there’s nothing, finally, small-scale about this masterly portrait of life as it is led by millions, with all its changing moods and testing metamorphoses. As a family outing, it’s a must, but I’d say it’s open to all.
Until June 15. Tickets: 01243 781312; cft.org.uk