A touchingly fruitful collaboration between movement-orientated Frantic Assembly and the State Theatre Company of South Australia, this perfectly recast UK production (co-directed by Scott Graham and Geordie Brookman) retains the suburban Australian location (Hallet Cove in Adelaide’s suburbs) but the accents are deliberately British – what’s happening here could happen almost anywhere.
Bob and Fran’s four children have – more or less – flown the nest, though younger son Mark (who’s making money in the financial services) still thinks, in his late twenties, that it’s okay to drop off his laundry for mum to wash, and, at 19, Rosie (the youngest by a long way and not quite an afterthought) still comes running back home when a brief affair on her European travels leaves her broken-hearted. Early thirties son Mark (Matthew Barker) has just split from his long-term girlfriend and married daughter Pip (Natalie Casey), a couple of years his senior and with kids of her own, is unhappy in a way which Fran recognises only too well.
credit: Manuel Harlan
There’s a lovely, carefully observed naturalness to the interfamilial interactions which are interspersed with stylised movement, lit by a host of bare overhead light bulbs and accompanied by Nils Frahm’s gentle music. And at the centre is the convincingly drawn relationship between Imogen Stubbs’ strong-minded Fran and Ewan Stewart’s devoted Bob who both love their kids fiercely and think, as parents usually do, that they always know what’s best for them. Go see.
Lyric Hammersmith, King Street, W6 0QL
Tube: Hammersmith
Until 1st October 2016
£15.00 – £35.00
