Guest Blog: 'I Needed To Do Something Drastic': Writer and Composer Tim Firth On Creating THIS IS MY FAMILY

Someone once told me writing a musical with an original story would be like climbing Everest. This turned out to be not entirely true. A mountaineer at least knows Everest is there to be climbed. That it has a top to be reached. That it will not disappear under him halfway up. None of these comforts are afforded the writer. You have to have a really good reason for abandoning the reassurance of a pre-existing story.

One dreadful morning in America I woke up in a hotel room and realised I was writing something that I wouldn’t go to see. A cocktail of flattery, money and morbid fascination had led me to this point. I need to do something drastic. The drastic thing I did culminated in my sitting down at a grand piano on the bare stage of the Lyceum theatre in Sheffield to play the first half of a musical to Daniel Evans. When I finished, I turned round and asked him ‘d’you want to know what happens next?’ He nodded. I got back on the train and wrote the second half.

A few years earlier I’d written a musical called Our House by poring through the songs of Madness in search of a story the band didn’t know they’d written. To write This Is My Family I did exactly the same thing only with my own songs. Willy Russell and I had recently done a show of words and music for which we’d forced each other to write new songs via a series of regular show and tells. It was like a musical Weightwatchers.

Through my new songs I found a story that was buried too deep for me to notice at the time - something about family and losing sight of what was valuable and needing something drastic to be reminded of it. What I couldn’t see at the time was that it was about waking up in a hotel room the other side of the world from my family writing shows I wouldn’t go to see.

I came home from America with the idea of a girl winning a dream holiday that would take her to the other side of the world if she so wished. All I knew was that she would choose to take her parents back to the place they first met. I put a laptop on the piano and she walked out and said the words ‘Ok. So. This is my family’. I played the notes those four words seemed to suggest.

Jump forward a few years and a new cast are sitting in a rehearsal room under the watchful eye of director Vicky Featherstone, singing those four notes. I tell them I think this is a relatively simple musical. They look at me as if they are going to kill me. Performing it - I’m told - is like being on a runaway train; you’ll reach your destination if you cling on but if you fall off you’ll just sit with your arse in the dust watching tail lights disappear into the distance.

And why tell this story as a musical? Above all the usual answers, there is this: dignifying the normal breakfast of a normal family with a big score might just give the lie to the idea there is any such thing as a normal family and that the mundane is not, in truth, the beautiful dulled by repetition. Listening to Caroline Humphris’ orchestrations for the first time made me realise that whatever anyone else might think of my musical, writing it was, for me, the right decision.

Read our review of This Is My Family here.

Tim Firth Headshot Photo Credit: Kat Hannan

Production Photo Credits: Mark Senior