Minerva, Chichester
James Nesbitt and Sheila Hancock star in Tim Firth’s touching comedy about a dysfunctional group of relatives
Musicals head inexorably towards big ensemble numbers, a convention underlining the genre’s default moral of redemptive togetherness. So This Is My Family is striking in having no choral singing at all. Even when several of the six characters sing together, they hold their own lines contrapuntally. This device sonically illustrates the show’s subject of family life, a dynamic in which the best hope of harmony is that stubborn solos occasionally coincide.
Daughter Nicky, 13, wins a children’s competition for an essay about relatives. But the account that touches the judges glosses over the communication gulf between mum and dad, gran’s developing dementia, big brother’s goth-related catatonia, and auntie’s heat-seeking libido. The prize is a family holiday anywhere, but the location chosen seeds a surprising change of set and mood in the second act.
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