Fun Home: A heartwarming and heartbreaking triumph

Fun Home

Gate Theatre

★★★★★

Sitting at her drawing desk, sketching the comics that her father, Bruce, despised, Alison Bechdel tentatively outlines an act of “historic restoration”. Bruce, after stepping out of the closet in middle-age, died by suicide. Through her art, Alison is trying to make sense of her father’s life and his death. She asks herself: “Was it because of me?” She wonders: “Was it her easy acceptance of her own sexuality that spurred her father’s despair?”

Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s musical adaptation of Bechdel’s graphic memoir is structured by vignettes that mimic the source material’s approach to time, with a plaintive six-note oboe theme providing a seamless musical fluidity that allows us to follow Alison as she steps in and out of the past.

We meet three Alisons as the story unfolds, and the narrative conceit is brilliantly coded in this Irish premiere production at the Gate Theatre by costume designer Lara Campbell. Campbell’s committed visual approach to detail is followed through in every element of director Róisín McBrinn’s vision of this offbeat, indie musical theatre piece.

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Paul Wills’ chalky white outline of the Bechdel house on Maple Avenue – a family home and a funeral parlour – provides rectangular frames for the action to unfold in; comic strip boxes brought to life.

The live band is housed on an interior upstairs balcony and Sinéad McKenna’s lights shade Alison’s memories with a sepulchral glim that evokes the funereal nature of the family business, in both its real and metaphorical sense, as well as the black and white representation in Bechdel’s book.

Video design from Neil O’Driscoll is integrated with a light touch that provides dramatic urgency to Alison’s quest for answers to her father’s tragedy rather than literal representation of her drawings.

[ The Bechdel Test ‘was just a little lesbian joke in the 1980s. I never meant for it to be some kind of rule’ ]

An extraordinarily talented cast adds five-star performances to the five-star songbook, which includes standout solos from each of the Alisons as well as her parents, although Tesori’s score provides segues for the story’s continuous evolution that runs counter to the idea of the “showstopper”.

Even so, Jodi Kaye’s big voice belies Small Alison’s stature, most notably in Ring of Keys. Orla Scally brings power, playfulness and passion to Medium Alison’s coming out anthem, Changing my Major. Killian Donnelly adds tenderness to Bruce’s showmanship throughout, and wounded desperation in Edges of the World in particular. Nichola MacEvilly, meanwhile, gets the opportunity to tell Helen Bechdel’s side of the story as it comes to its climax in the quietly devastating Days and Days.

Finally, Frances McNamee as Alison provides a central vocal hook that carries us through the 90-minute show, her distinct folksy tone perfectly complementing the quirkiness of Tesori and Kron’s songbook and Bechdel’s personal history.

Bechdel subtitled Fun Home “a family tragicomic” and this excellent iteration on the intimate Gate Theatre stage captures that oppositional balance perfectly. It is both a heartwarming and heartbreaking triumph.

Fun Home runs at the Gate Theatre until August 26th