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A couple and their four grown-up children are desperately trying to play happy families in the rose-filled garden of their Adelaide home. But something’s awry – and it’s not just the kids’ inability to lay down their own, new roots. Frantic Assembly's co-production with South Australia's State Theatre Company comes with gilded reviews from its tour of Australia: recast, the lustre has rubbed off.
Andrew Bovell's sprawling play is a kind of encyclopaedia of all the issues that can arise between parents and their adult children. As well as bickering over how old is old enough to iron your own shirts (28, since you asked) the parents of these giant babies wrestle as their progeny live out shock scenarios seemingly plucked from the first-person pages of Take A Break magazine. One sister leaves her own children to bunk up with a man she met at a conference, another’s a financial fraudster, and another is embroiled in a crudely handled transgender storyline.
The embattled parents themselves seem to have come from a rather different kind of editorial - perhaps a Daily Mail polemic on the selfishness of Generation Y. They unleash impossibly banal wisdom along the lines of 'I had two kids and a mortgage at your age', or 'It's a mother's job to make her children cry' as their feckless foursome waste their hard-earned cash on fast cars or, heaven forbid, creative writing courses.
Frantic Assembly’s trademark physical theatre interludes feel clumsy, here, as the cast struggle to inject emotional depth into the story. These characters are forever making resounding statements, spouting homilies about the nature of home, love, family, and human nature. But despite spilling a huge amount of words, tears, and shredded rose petals, somehow, the play ends up saying nothing at all.