The things Andrew Bovell’s south Australian characters know to be true are by and large the ones we all do: principally, that however many opportunities we make for them or however determinedly we try to steer them, our children will not simply grow up to be “Better versions of us”. Bob and Fran’s four grown-up kids run the gamut of life’s complexities, through financial malfeasance and marital breakup to, at one extreme, transgender and at the other, youngest daughter Rosie (Kirsty Oswald)’s uncertainty about any path, as they each try to negotiate between and around Fran’s strident controlling compulsion and Bob’s well-meant but limited understanding.

Well, I say “we all”: obviously the transgender issue doesn’t visit every family, but it’s hardly blue-moon rare, either. More to the point, though, when you assemble the full portfolio, it does rather seem to be labelled “first-world problems”. Bovell writes with undeniable sensitivity and articulacy, but I’m afraid not in this case to much point. The ordinariness of the Price family in Adelaide suburb Hallett Cove surprisingly conceals not universality but simply more ordinariness.

Scott Graham and Geordie Brookman co-direct for their respective companies, Frantic Assembly and the State Theatre Company of South Australia; this production premièred in Adelaide in May, and has now been recast for a UK tour. The actors use their own accents, except for Imogen Stubbs as Fran who matches the Lancashire voice of Natalie Casey’s Pip, the most resistant of the children and the one who has inherited most of her mother’s obstinacy. Graham includes a number of Frantic Assembly’s trademark movement sequences, more tender than in some other Frantics productions but I’m afraid now wielding little power other than brand recognition. Geoff Cobham decks the stage in a well cultivated garden, the pride and joy of Ewan Stewart’s Bob, beneath a shimmering panoply of lightbulbs in a stylised starscape.

Bovell certainly has a point that coming of age only really begins after adolescence and can continue into the sixties and beyond, but his piece is principally driven by character rather than events or thematic musings. For an outfit like the Frantics, that strikes me as rather vieux chapeau.

Written for the Financial Times.