Director: Vicky Featherstone
Book & Music: Tim Firth
This is My Family was originally staged at Sheffield Theatres in 2013, winning the UK Theatre Award for Best Musical. 12 years later, it’s back at Southwark Playhouse Elephant with a brand-new production by Anthology Theatre. A lot has happened culturally and in theatreland over the last 12 years. Sensibilities have shifted, fashions have changed. Does a musical about a middle-class, hetero-normative, white nuclear family stack up? Are we all beyond Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons and 2.4 Children? Can it have anything significant to say in this current climate? No matter how cynical or guarded we might be, this funny, feel-good musical will thaw the hardest of hearts.
A messy, inter-generational family so beloved of Bisto and Sainsbury’s ads explodes on stage. Dry Northerner dad, Steve (Michael Jibson) has been with his stay-at-home wife Yvonne (Gemma Whelan), mother of their two teenagers, since they were 16. Their non-communicative, druidic son, Matt, a typically misunderstood 17-year-old, flounces and grunts in an impressive acting debut by Luke Lambert. Yvonne’s sister, Sian, free-wheeling and independent since her divorce, is gloriously embodied by Victoria Elliott. Her leitmotif and ‘motto’ song, Sex is a Safari is memorable.
May, Steve’s elderly, church-going mum (Gay Soper) has a failing memory and close connection with the family’s youngest, Nicky, the 13-year-old daughter (Nancy Allsop) who opens the show with the title song. Nicky wants her family to be happy and united, and when she wins a holiday, she chooses a campsite on Black Rock Lake, the location where her parents first holidayed and where her grandmother was courted by her future husband as the destination. What could possibly go right?
While some shows promise the earth or hit an audience with lofty intentions and can fail to deliver, This is My Family does the opposite. It’s a simple premise: a family under pressure take a camping trip and meets more challenges. Expectations are not overly high. But woven into the simplistic storyline, potentially stereotypical characters, and toe-tapping, lyrically rich songs, is a seductive tale that draws an audience in, with humour, wit, intelligence, and depth.
The low-level conflict, typical of family dramas, which centres around humdrum routine, builds into something deeper and more resonant. While the surface, spoken dialogue revolves around the banal and everyday, the songs, melodiously accompanied by six instrumentalists, allow characters to reveal their inner lives. As the characters sing out their deep desires and secret fears, there’s a sense of life passing by, a dread of ageing and the question that daren’t be spoken out loud, ‘Is This It?’ Is ‘the family’ simply a trap where individual needs must be relinquished? If families are so great, why is everyone so angry, unhappy, unfulfilled?
After two hours with a fifteen-minute interval, you come out caring about all the characters, reflecting on what they’ve learnt and how they have changed through the course of the camping trip. In the second half, there’s a lightning tree, which despite being struck by a forceful blow, continues to stand. Families may change and evolve, individuals leave, become frail and die, but the family, like the scarred tree, continues to exist.
Everyone might not have realised every personal dream, but beneath the weight of disillusionment, disappointment and domesticity, love and commitment remain. Families can pull apart or pull together, and any crisis tests the mettle of a family unit. The family can also yield treasure, the power of shared and inherited memories, genetic traits, as well as familial support and togetherness. While sometimes a cramped and uncomfortable space, it can also be warm, secure, accepting, with room to grow.
As one of May’s songs asserts, “Love is what’s left, when you’ve sucked out all the chocolate.” Ultimately, This is My Family will make you smile, laugh, and think. While a lot has changed in 12 years, this musical has a relatable, universal draw that will undoubtedly have wide appeal and delight many audiences.
Runs until 12 July 2025
