Writer: Arabella Jacobson
Director: Luke Offield
The Swedish town of Gammelstad, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was a kyrkstad, or church town, that existed mainly to provide overnight accommodation for people from the surrounding countryside while they attended church. This is the setting for Arabella Jacobson’s play of the same name, which follows a family through several visits across some five years in the 1860s – although none of the setting’s uniqueness really ever comes across in a play that assumes we know rather more about the traditions around kyrkstads than the script cares to relate.
Jacobson and Luke Tearney play children Birgitta and Bror, accompanying their sickly mother, Hedda (Isabella Cottrell Kirby) and volatile father (Niall O’Mara’s Gunnar). Theirs is not a happy family; the children desperately dream up imaginary parties in order to distract themselves from the abuse meted out to them by their father, only to fear for their own safety when they neglect the chores he has allotted to them.
The dysfunctional family dynamic is obvious from the off, with Jacobson’s script painting O’Mara’s father with almost demonic levels of aggression towards his whole family. With so much shouting going on, it is hardly any surprise that Cottrell Kirby, as his wife, complains of perpetual headaches. Unfortunately, the parents are afforded little characterisation beyond the raised voices, rendering them cyphers compared to the more expansive personalities Jacobson gives to her own and Tearney’s characters.
Both Brigitta and Bror have light and shade to their personalities, and although they too are wont to devolve into shouting matches, there is a strong sense of a familial bond, and the friendship and enmity that comes with it, between the pair. There is a thematic suggestion of generational trauma, as Bror demonstrates a similar tendency to quick anger as his father, while his sister exhibits symptoms of the same mental infirmity that gripped her mother. This is, regrettably, achieved with much of the same shouting that mars the play’s opening scenes, albeit tempered with a self-awareness that the previous generation lacked.
Part of the sense that the children may, in fact, grow to be improvements over their parents’ generation is helped by Cottrell Kirby’s second role of Ruth, a girl nearer Birgitta’s age than Bror’s and who befriends them both. Her interactions with Jacobson are especially sweet, as the two girls face the growing demands of approaching womanhood.
As the years progress – marked out by an amusingly small and anachronistic flip chart whose advancement is easy to miss – there is the sense of the siblings leaning on each other and their friends, giving them a sense of community and stability that their now-dead mother and absent, drunken father could not give them.
But for all its messages on the virtues of friendship and other support systems – which we in the 21st century might call “found family” – there’s not enough spark in the script, nor in its direction, to really engage with the topic in the way the writer seems to hope. Gammelstad, the town, is a beautifully preserved symbol of a particular point in Sweden’s history. Gammelstad, the play, is far less certain of its place in the world.
Runs until 23 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
