How am I supposed to fix this?’ A lament uttered by anyone, everyone who has ever walked into their family home and felt like they have bumbled into a house full of strangers. Unusually irritating strangers who are swearing and fighting, and laughing and fighting, and conducting most of their daily business whilst fighting. Suddenly, fix seems the wrong word, too half-chewed and bitty, to deal conclusively with your family’s fault-lines. But aren’t we all supposed to love each other? No. Nothing more than a popular fraud perpetuated by soaped-up American dramas, where everyone is just a high-five away from a hug and a prayer. In the end, we will settle for the martyred knowledge that if our family are here annoying us, then at least they are not off annoying anyone else. And it is on these strange familial contradictions, these wholesome ironies that THEATREclub thrives.
The domestic drama has long been locked in combat with the notion of colour, denying its very existence through a worn set and a decidedly grim script usually conducted in CAPITAL LETTERS. On entering the Project, I was delighted not to be gathered around another dreary kitchen sink to watch a dull, grey cast bemoan their gritty lives. In fact, The Family is so highly expressive, so joyfully vivid that it may banish the insipid family drama to the mausoleum. Combining a music video aesthetic with a nightmarish David Lynchian vision of suburbia, The Family does not deal in half-measures. Exhausting dance routines, frenzied dinners, barely concealed anger bubbling and ricocheting off a set that is as easily dismantled as a doll’s house- The Family understands that the power of theatre lies in not telling, but showing. “Fuck away the books”, Gerard Kelly says at one point, “you don’t need them if you can do things like that.”
It is a sense of community that also weighs heavily on this family. Theirs is a community of brick-faced walls, attended to by similarly brick-faced teenagers, where life and its movements are silently judged and assessed. The simple act of going to the shop is a group activity and a neighbour’s dog is the catalyst for some of the funnier scenes. Certainly, at times, this family’s lives seem to be little more than a series of humorous interactions with people who aren’t there, about things that probably won’t happen. Much of this humour is indebted to the charisma of Shane Byrne and Gerard Kelly, which is in such energetic and playful abundance that it can’t help but make you smile. At times, scenes seemed overlong and points stretched until they became vaguely tedious, but sometimes even the best families demand patience.
Like all good family outings, it ends in tears, recriminations and vows never to return home. It all made me oddly nostalgic.
Nicole Flattery
