Lyceum Studio, Edinburgh, 28 May 2009, and touring

Story of a Family

IT’S BILLED as a show for children older than six and “for everybody” – and for once it’s not just a ruse by the marketing department to get more people in. Opening at the Bank of Scotland Imaginate children’s festival before heading north, Story of a Family is a high-energy comedy (with a bitter twist) that does a splendid job at entertaining all ages.

Imagine Desperate Housewives staged as physical theatre and you’ll get a sense of the nuclear bomb Italy’s Compagnia Rodisio puts under the nuclear family. Beatrice Baruffini plays the daughter, nominally loyal to her parents, mad on gymnastics and not so keen on her spaghetti.

Consuelo Ghiretti is her mother – who surely wouldn’t be out of place on Wisteria Lane – a woman neurotically proud of her kitchen and obsessively keen for her family to succeed. And Davide Doro is the father, self-regarding and smug in those rare moments he stops fulminating over the newspaper.

The joke, played out over a series of athletic rallies and spiralling repetitions, is that behind the image of the perfect happy family the cracks can’t help but show. The more the trio insist that all is well, the more their self-deception becomes apparent. Yet so wholeheartedly have they bought into their own mythology, they are incapable of being anything other than nauseatingly positive.

They play the game with a number of variations on a stage empty but for table, chairs and light shade. We see early signs of strain when Beatrice pulls away from a family portrait – all cheesy smiles and upright poses – to escape at high speed from her parents. Davide makes a similar bid for freedom, hiding himself among the audience, but once reunited they act like it was just meaningless fun.

At home in the kitchen, they continue to keep their emotions in check. Nobody has the nerve to complain about the maddening melody Consuelo sings as she mimes the making of dinner in a mood of beatific satisfaction. Everyone accepts Davide’s know-all pompousness and Beatrice even gets away with flicking her food in her parents’ faces.

It’s good knockabout fun – intensified as their daily routines spin faster and faster and English makes way for high-speed Italian – but it can’t last forever. The mood turns dark in the closing moments as the family fail to keep up the pretence, falling back on a kind of desperate optimism.

As a vision of family life it verges on the cynical, but the abiding message is nobody’s perfect and it’s unhealthy to pretend otherwise.

Story of a Family is at the Garrison Theatre, Lerwick, Shetland, on 9-10 June 2009

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Links

• Imaginate
• Compagnia Rodiso