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.