HAPPY FAMILY. To 23 October.
London
HAPPY FAMILY
by Giles Cooper
Finborough Theatre To 23 October
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Sun 3.30pm
Runs 1hr 55min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7373 3842
www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 17 October
Sharp revival of a snappy little sixties number.The title of this 1966 play has to be ironic and it is bitterly so. The Solstice family is English, middle-class and quite proud of it in an age when despite gritty northern realism blowing in during the 1950s - white middle-class existence remained the main stuff of mainstream theatre.
Two hours might seem a long time to state what is obvious these days. Alex Marker's direction for Odd Sok Productions plays at a high temperature with a fast pulse, a feverish approach advisable when looking back from 2004 on such darling dodos. For Cooper's play is set in 1963, when the sixties were only swinging into gear. His absurdity predated the likes of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers which thrust a general sense of the surreal into mainstream popular comedy.
Nowadays it needs the pace and edge of unreality of sheer knowing mockery the production provides. Yet Cooper has a tougher line and manner than, say, David Turner in his initially successful 1962 satire on the suburbs Semi-Detached. And if the period's remote, its attitudes and manners history, no longer needing sustained attack, Cooper delves beneath the surface to point up truths about such families.
First, their happiness often incorporates a quantity of misery; there's talk here of punishments, petty or mysterious. There's fear, of the dark, of electricity. Linking these is superstition and lack of clear thought (how little people knew back then). And there's the paralysis of will imposed by the middle-class family rituals, designed to provide orderly existence and deny the world outside. No-one reads a modern book in a world formed by the likes of Winnie-the-Pooh.
Each performer has their clear territory Caroline Taylor's younger sister is evidently chained by family ways from her first outsize grin when her brother arrives. Scott Brooksbank makes him believably the financier whose colleagues might never know (unless they share) his mindset. Camilla Corbett's outstanding as the elder sister desperate to get to a life that's (a key word in the play) normal, Will Godfrey good as the fiancee whose presence only emphasises the class-bound life they lead.
Deborah Solstice: Caroline Taylor
Mark Solstice: Scott Brooksbank
Susan Solstice: Camilla Corbett
Gregory Butler: Will Godfrey
Director: Vivian Munn
Designer: Alex Marker
Lighting: Alex Watson
2004-10-20 01:07:48