Family Business (tour – Watford)
It’s a very clever play, and a witty one as well. But, at the end of it all, Julian Mitchell’s new play Family Business lacks one vital ingredient. It has no heart.
Matthew Lloyd’s production is as effortlessly smooth as Mitchell’s writing and there’s a good set by Ruari Murchison which gives us the ground-floor of a barn conversion dominating (or perhaps hemmed in by) the neighbouring hills and valleys.
An excellent central performance comes from Gerard Murphy as William, a widower with a multi-million pound travel company recovering from a heart attack, who also has four grown-up children and a carer (apparently a left-over from his wife’s decline into Alzheimer’s disease). Ben Onwukwe matches him as Solomon, the softly-spoken, steel-cored survivor.
Then there are the four siblings. Jane has a financier husband (suffering from the recession), twin daughters (one with an expensive pony habit, the other heading for an equally expensive boarding-school) and an unbecoming greed as well as equally unpleasant prejudices.
Her brother Tom is trying to “go it alone” but his Chinese business-partner has disappeared off the edge of an unfinished motorway and the funds to finish a luxury holiday complex on a coral-reef atoll have been crushed with him. What’s more, his Polynesian girl friend has recently given birth to their son.
Hugo is a born-again ecological warrior, at odds with his family in particular and the climate change-ignoring western world in general. And younger sister Kate? Kate is the dark horse in this stable, and she’s given real character by Anna O’Grady in a very well-paced portrayal.
You can also believe in Chris Kelham’s Tom and – in so far as his attitudinising allows – in Tom Berish’s Hugo. Partly because not all her words were as clear as they might have been, Tessa Churchard’s Jane is the least satisfactory person on stage. But I suspect that, just as we in the audience don’t like Jane very much, neither does the author.
