ajhlovestheatre

THIS IS MY FAMILY 

book and music by Tim Firth

directed by Vicky Featherstone

Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London – until 12 July 2025

running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval 

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/this-is-my-family/

Not many British writers working regularly in musical theatre are committed to putting “average” people on stage and letting the limelight give them a sheen of magic, but it’s something Tim Firth has made a specialty out of. His books for Our House (still unsurpassed when it comes to jukebox tuners) and the stage adaptation of Calendar Girls are examples of this and are full of heart, humour and truth. First seen in Sheffield in 2013, then again in a 2019 revision at Chichester, this cute, low key confection is a sort of apotheosis of this preoccupation with white, straight, fundamentally ordinary folks going about their lives. 

However, where Our House and Calendar Girls (previously The Girls) had the music of Madness and Gary Barlow respectively, Firth has provided his own for This Is My Family and, despite the ravishing arrangements by Caroline Humphris and the top flight work of Natalie Pound’s band, it’s one of the weakest elements in what is otherwise an engaging show. Firth’s lyrics are taut, conversational, funny, touching when they need to be, but his music is bland and recitative-heavy, only occasionally flourishing into anything approaching a melody. 

This means that the show doesn’t really rise above the level of superior sitcom with added singing. The writing is so sharp though, full of love and with a clear-eyed dissection of family dynamics, that this often feels like more than enough. Vicky Featherstone’s production contains a lot to enjoy. The performances are absolutely lovely. All six cast members inhabit their roles with truth and commitment.

Michael Jibson, who got his first big stage break as the unforgettable hero of Firth’s 2002 Olivier winner Our House, is Steve, just turned 41 and in the grip of a midlife crisis, hurling himself into projects like rollerblading or turning his garden rockery into a hot tub, while dreaming of emigrating to the UAE. Jibson plays him as on the permanent verge of fury, so that when moments of sweetness or genuine emotion peep through, it’s genuinely affecting. His marriage to Gemma Whelan’s feisty, likeable Yvonne has lost its lustre, a situation exacerbated by the arrival of May, Steve’s increasingly vulnerable elderly mother who inadvertently nearly set fire to her own home.

Gay Soper invests May with a heart piercing combination of confused desolation and joie de vivre, sometimes within seconds of each other. In writing and performance, this is a pretty devastating portrait of a failing mind, and also a rare example of the score powerfully serving the story, as Soper gets to reprise variants of a folk song May has known, presumably since childhood, each version giving a clue to her mental state. 

Victoria Elliott has fun as Yvonne’s outrageous, freewheeling sister, although the role feels a bit underwritten. Similarly, Luke Lambert does a great job of making sense of Steve and Yvonne’s older child Matt, written and designed as a bewilderingly unlikely goth/druid attention seeker, who feels very much like a middle aged person’s idea of what a rebellious teen looks like. 

The lynchpin of the whole cast is Nancy Allsop as thirteen year old Nicky, observing and commenting on her family. She’s incredibly sweet but never sappy, and totally real; it’s a winning performance, and the conduit between the audience and her sometimes highly irascible relatives. Amy Ball CDG and director Featherstone have done a remarkable job assembling a cast of actors who authentically look, feel and sound like they could be one family.

Chloe Lamford’s wendy house set undergoes a satisfying transformation just before the interval and Featherstone’s staging makes some of the best use of Southwark’s Elephant space that I have seen to date. The singing voices overall are rawer and less polished than one is often used to hearing in musicals but they work in this context of regular people singing, and the transition from speech to song is frequently imperceptible. Not an actor known for doing musicals, Whelan’s phrasing is particularly impressive.

Not much happens in This Is My Family, but it’s broadly relatable and the emotion of it sort of creeps up on you, plus it’s often laugh-out-loud funny. It also feels like one of the most quintessentially British musicals I’ve seen in quite some time. There’s nothing about it that screams essential viewing and I could’ve done without the treacly ending, but its heart is in the right place, and it’s generally a very nice couple of hours in the theatre.