Review: THE ABNORMAL FAMILIARITY OF US, Theatre503

In an increasingly hostile environment for emerging theatremakers, Theatre503 continues to do the vital work of staging new plays by new creatives, showcasing voices that might not be heard other than buried beneath the cacophony of a festival. 

For a reviewer, it really ought to be an obligation to spend some evenings in this venue, at the Bush Theatre, the Jack Studio Theatre and the Finborough (there are others of course, but not many) in order to observe the green shoots of the Theatre of the 2030s and to support a demanding, risky and, all too often, thankless task of fostering new writing. There’s always a frisson of excitement in the air too - we really don’t know what we’re going to get when the lights go down.

The Abnormal Familiarity of Us opens on two young women surrounded by stuff and three boxes labelled ‘Keep’, ‘Bin’, ‘Donate’. They bicker - stress so often crowds out grief when a parent dies - old resentments bubbling up, Ollie (the elder) at home having nursed the now departed father and Reese (the younger) off at uni, having a good time, all the time. The mood changes when they turn up their mother’s long lost journal and, with the help of a four decades old hallucinogenic mushroom or two handily stashed nearby, they ‘see’ their parents before their very eyes. As we all were once, one is girlish and bashful, the other laddish and brash. At least at first they are…

The set up has much in common with Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s superb Lebanese film, Memory Box, as the daughters discover that their parents did indeed have sex (why is it that the one thing kids can be absolutely certain of always comes as an icky surprise) and much else they did not suspect. But the innocent charm of reading about their parents tripping in the back row of the flicks back in the day, gives way to deep-rooted mental health issues and matters left long conveniently dangerously unexamined, bubble to the surface, scorching the skin of Ollie and Reese.

First time playwright, Libbi Moss (who also plays Eleanor, the mother) has delivered a committed script to her company and gets strong performances in return. Lucy Rose Gibbons lends Ollie a undisguised victimhood but one leavened by a hard-nosed practicality that ensures that it never topples into self-pity; Anna-Jorge Somerville is less mature, more vulnerable but buttressed by an emotional hinterland that Ollie lacks. Billy Pearson as Johnny, their barely out of his teens father, is underwritten in comparison and might have fared better in a longer run time than the crisp 60 minutes that director, Tomas Howells, requires. 

One can see the outlines of a bigger 90 minutes play that gives full value to the characters and the issues Moss tackles and I hope the play is developed to do that. If so, consideration might also be given to the balance of the work. 

There’s a little too much exposition, particularly in two lengthy concurrent monologues delivered at the end of the play that tilt the production from ‘show’ into ‘tell’. It’s not unusual in a debut play to do that and Moss can probably trust her audience more in understanding postnatal depression and how that can trigger a wider neurosis (though that context was certainly not as widely known in the 80s). There’s room too for a more nuanced approach to examining how non-nuclear families meet their challenges in a society in which traditional norms are less and less commonplace and in which an absent parent need not produce waves of trauma propagating across decades.

If that makes the play sound like a work-in-progress, it’s not my intention, as the building blocks of a fine and important drama are in place and functioning well. There’s just a feeling (and this is a good thing as it doesn’t often arise) that I wanted to know more about how Eleanor and Johnny had dealt with the hard, hard graft of parenting and also what happened next for Ollie and Reese now forced to address the elephant in the room. 

These four characters are bigger than the frame they’ve been given for now and I hope to meet them again in the future.

The Abnormal Familiarity of Us at Theatre503 until 16 April

Photo Credits: Susy Kate Media