Theatre review: This Is My Family

First seen in Sheffield in 2013, Tim Firth's (book and music) This Is My Family has taken twelve years to make it to London, and after seeing Vicky Featherstone's production at Southwark Playhouse I have to wonder: Why the rush? Nicky (Nancy Allsop) is a 13-year-old girl who's entered a competition to explain why her family is perfect, and has told the truth, but left out a few salient details: Parents Steve (Michael Jibson) and Yvonne (Gemma Whelan) have been together since they were 16, but they're drifting apart and Steve is considering taking a job in Abu Dhabi. Older brother Matt (Luke Lambert) used to be very close to her but now he's having a teenage druid phase and obsessing over his girlfriend. And grandmother May (Gay Soper) has the mischievous side she describes, but she's now also got fast-encroaching dementia.

But the rosy picture she presented won the competition, and the prize is a holiday to anywhere on earth. After toying with some actually decent suggestions, Nicky takes them all to the camping site where her parents first met, in the hope it'll turn the real family back into the one she described.

Among other things that made my heart sink early on was the realisation that this was one of those shows where the basic premise as described in the blurb - the camping holiday - was actually going to be the twist into the interval, and the entire first act would be building up to it. It means over an hour of setting up something that would be pretty predictable even if it wasn't in the advertising: The dad whose DIY projects always collapse, the teenage boy who communicates in grunts, and a horny divorced aunt, Sian (Victoria Elliott,) with a string of younger boyfriends.

It's a sitcom setup but there's rarely any actual jokes in it, and the music is not so much understated as underpowered: If you come out of the show with the title line stuck in your internal jukebox it's only because the show has Nicky repeat it every couple of minutes of the two-and-a-half hours. The show is practically through-sung to what might as well be the same tune and is certainly the same general mood: A kind of resigned, happy-sad eye-roll at the family whether they look like they're falling apart or rebuilding themselves.

Chloe Lamford's set looks good, and has an interesting conceit of hiding its full extent - spooky woods with the musicians in the branches - until the second act, squeezing the family into a dollhouse until the big reveal. But it's not a dynamic that's matched by the show, which soon reverts to the same (lack of) energy as before, even the family's woodland adventures essentially melancholy. We then get a case of Multiple Ending Syndrome so egregious it feels deliberate, with Nicky repeatedly standing alone centre-stage reprising the title line, only to introduce yet another coda.

And May's dementia is so severe it could have served as a very dark underscore to the story if it wasn't so flippantly dealt with; although who knows, maybe ending her story by putting a woman who can't live alone without burning the house down, into a granny flat built by a man all of whose projects collapse, is an even darker twist into a deliberate murder attempt (Yvonne does actively pray for her mother-in-law's death more than once.)

But if I'm having to imagine more interesting interpretations of the story it doesn't say much about what we actually get, and in the end I thought a great cast were wasted on a tedious musical that barely tapped into their talents.

This Is My Family by Tim Firth is booking until the 12th of July at Southwark Playhouse Elephant.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mark Senior.