The Family

Project Arts Centre, Dublin Previews Jan 13-16 Opens Jan 17-28 8pm 12-18 projectartscentre.ie 01-8819613

Everybody starts somewhere. And for writers from Sophocles to Shakespeare, Synge to Chekhov, O’Neill to Miller, Friel to Murphy – well, how long have you got? – it all begins at home. The family is a crucible of political strife and fatal flaws, inflexible ideals and redemption or damnation.

You can see the attraction of this unit group for dramatists: personal and political, representing past, present and future, they are contradictory individuals bound together by biological accident. You might find your own exhausting, but as far as subjects go families are inexhaustible.

That's why the new show from THEATREclub, which has quickly established itself as both formally adventurous and theatrically riveting, can combine clichés and new approaches in its treatment. Riffing on white picket fences and Happy Daysreferences, its cast (who co-devised the show with director Grace Dyas and designer Doireann Coady) also speak in splinters of flinty Dublin dialogue: families are placeless and timeless.

Close to Dyas's groundbreaking Heroin in approach, The Familybreaks down the vocabulary of theatre itself while playfully and hauntingly evoking the universal discomforts of a family dinner, the incommunicable sadness of betrayal, and unsettling acts of stage violence.

That, though, could only be a child of the THEATREclub family: the world’s first successful postdramatic psychodrama.

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The Devil’s Spine Band Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin