Stage Struck

FAMILIES. CAN’T live with ’em. Can’t kill ’em. Nor, for that matter, can you defy ’em, unknowingly marry ’em, illegally bury ’em, speedily and efficiently avenge ’em, or – God help you – ever please ’em.

Unless, that is, you are in the family-friendly arena of a theatre where all of this is permitted and sometimes actively encouraged.

Beneath every family portrait of rosy togetherness, paternal pride and filial respect lurks an undercurrent of crippling expectation, inadequacy and bitter resentment. The theatre gives its most extreme expression to these dark thoughts in roiling Greek dramas of patricide, matricide and infanticide – desires that polite society only expresses through deep regression therapy or during the late stages of a Pictionary game.

We conceal it, the stage reveals it: from Little Womento Big Maggie, there's a thin veneer between devoted sisters and a psychotic bunch of misfits bound together by biological accident.

"Happy families are all alike," Leo Tolstoy's Anna Kareninafamously begins, "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Personal and political, symbolising the past, present and future, playing out endless serials of triumph and despair, families are such an inexhaustible subject that Sophocles, Chekhov, Ibsen, Lorca, Friel and Eastendershave not solved the riddle of this unit group. The new show from THEATREclub can simply call itself The Familyand be assured we know what they're on about.

THEATREclub's show can afford to be deliberately rootless because its subject is universal. Like Pan Pan's Oedipus Loves You,which distilled classic myth into domestic drama, The Familywants to find unfamiliar methods to address deeply familiar scenes: the disaster of a Sunday dinner, the incommunicable sadness of betrayal, unsettling acts of domestic violence.

It also marks a return to families not just for THEATREclub – a young collective whose interests pivot between social engagement, theatrical rule- breaking and riotous fun ( The Familydoes all three) – but for many contemporary theatre- makers whose work seemed to have long since left home.

Artists as diverse as David Bolger, Rimini Protokoll, She She Pop and Edit Kaldor have brought real parents and their children onstage in recent works, as though shrugging off adolescent embarrassment and showing some respect. We all come from somewhere.

Few of them dared suggest that these parents had done anything less than exemplary jobs, but the theatre tends to put our own families in perspective. Next to the traumas of the Oresteia or the shovel beatings of Synge, pretty much everyone’s fraught get- togethers are a walk in the park.

The secret of the stage, from kitchen-sink dramas to drawing- room comedies and even bedroom farces, is that humanity has never been successfully domesticated. Is it any wonder so many venues now do family discounts? Theatre, no less than charity, begins at home.