UK Edition
Review
Fun Home, Young Vic, review – a quirky, haunting, heartbreaking coming-of-age tale
Daddy, daddy, come here, OK, I need you! What are you doing?” The opening words of this quirky, stirring, heartbreaking American musical – staged on Broadway in 2015, where it won five Tonys – are sung (angelically) by a 10-year-old girl.
A plea familiar to fathers everywhere? It’s not every doting dad, though, who performs what Bruce Bechdel then does for his little princess, Alison: lie down and let her balance on his feet, so she can imagine she’s flying like Superman, and seeing all of Pennsylvania.
Does perform? No, did. Past tense, relived with the added perspective of adult hindsight; the child observed by her older self. Alison Bechdel described Fun Home, her bestselling graphic novel/memoir of 2006, as a "tragicomic". The resulting theatricalization (music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron) is suffused with the book’s conflicted evocation of childhood days past – even if it doesn’t fully catch the original’s deadpan humour.
What it does succeed above all in doing, though, is to relay Bechdel’s intricately sketched portrait of a father who – that moment of intimacy and indulgence aside – was remote to the point of eccentric comicality, then mortifyingly, irretrievably absent.
Pent-up with agonies of desire, Bechdel Snr, the unsentimental manager of a funeral home (irreverently referred to by his three kids as the "fun home"), led a tense double-life of married rectitude and illicit gay sex, finally stepping out in front of a truck just months after Alison came out to her parents as a lesbian. As played by Zubin Varla, he’s all strangulated commands and pitiable prissiness – fixated with the ideal home but unable to come out of the closet.
In Tesori’s acknowledged masterpiece Caroline, Or Change (heading into the West End later this year) the word "change" has considerable currency; in this comparable marvel you can't help noticing the word "draw". The older Alison (Kaisa Hammarlund, still and watchful through Sue Perkins-ish specs, hands often ruefully in jean pockets) stations herself at her cartoonist’s table.
She’s trying to draw out the truth of her upbringing, spiriting into life that sweetly innocent incarnation of her childhood (on press night, a sensational Brooke Haynes) and a sexually awakened teenage self (highly assured newcomer Eleanor Kane); different stages of life, different outlooks, in conversation with each other.
As reportedly was the case in New York, Sam Gold’s immaculate and emotionally articulate production creates a magical sense of interiors being rustled up in the blink of an eye. It honours the fluidity of the nimble, springy, conversational score, the band tucked high up either side of a set (David Zinn) that sometimes offers the fussiest decor at others a cheerless black back-wall. Gold seldom strives for a cartoon-strip aesthetic but achieves a tightly defined sense of space all the same.
An obvious charge against the show is that it lacks a host of instantly memorable numbers; the counter is that it’s more than the sum of its parts, reflecting experience in all its complexity. One glorious mock Jackson Five number, in which the little Bechtels gleefully cavort around a casket, replicates the endorphin rush of early, heedless youth, while some of the ballads are as poignant funeral orations, lamenting the death of dreams:. “I didn't raise you to give away your days, like me,” urges Jenna Russell’s mournful Helen, the sidelined wife and mother worn spectre-pale by the charade of happy families.
A profound and entertaining evening then – suggesting it was never better than when it was all ahead of us, but also that it’s vital to live a life undeceived, and undeceiving. Haunting. Yet fun.
Fun Home runs at the Young Vic, London SE1, until September 1: youngvic.org