Fun Home at the Royal Exchange Theatre – review

A silver coffee pot, a bunch of keys and a warped painting pushing out of its wooden frame are the starting points for Fun Home, the magnificent musical of memory, understanding and loss. Its heroine, Alison Bechdel, pulls them out of a battered cardboard box and looks at them wonderingly. In the centre of the stage, her younger self kneels on the floor unpacking the contents of the same box with her long dead father.

With music written by Jeanine Tesori and book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, the show premiered on Broadway in 2015, before reaching the UK via the Young Vic in 2018, and is only now getting its regional UK premiere as part of the 50^th anniversary season at the Manchester Royal Exchange.

But this adaptation of Bechdel’s graphic novel feels as if it has always belonged here, since the in-the-round setting is a perfect metaphor for a show that grapples with the idea of “making now give way to then”, as the older Alison (Jodie McNee) looks at child Alison (Harriet O’Shea on press night) and student Alison (Alice Audrey O’Hanlon) and tries to make sense of her unusual upbringing.

Unusual doesn’t quite cover it: Alison grew up in a funeral home and a historic house, both lavished with care by her father Bruce, who increasingly reels out of control thanks to his attempts to hide his homosexuality. When Alison leaves what the children mockingly call the “Fun Home”, and announces that she is gay, things reach a crisis. As she tells us early in the show: “He killed himself… and I became a lesbian cartoonist.”

That bald plot summary doesn’t begin to describe what a rich and often hilarious show Fun Home is. Tesori’s music has a glorious onward sweep, full of jazzy brass and jaunty tones, underpinned by its own melancholy questioning. The number where older Alison, standing by her drawing board, watches her younger self and her two brothers dancing around a coffin like a young Jackson Five as they write a commercial for the family business is a simple joy. So is the Partridge Family pastiche “Raincoat of Love”, when she imagines belonging to a happy and less complex family. “Changing My Major to Joan” is a brilliantly witty summation of the exhilaration of first love.

But what makes Fun Home a great musical rather than simply an enjoyable one is the way it examines the need to make sense of overwhelming events  – “Everything’s balanced and serene/like chaos never happens if it isn’t seen” – which is as much true of Alison’s impulse to order her life into drawings as it is of her father concealing his agony by making sure his Dresden Shepherdesses are arranged correctly on the top of the piano.

The production directed by Sarah Frankcom on Peter’s Butler’s sparsely evocative set – a piano, a chaise longue, a glowing TV, the all-important drawing board under Bethany Gupwell’s subtle lighting – catches this perfectly.

As each incarnation of Alison, O’Shea, O’Hanlon and McNee convey both her force and her restless vitality. Nigel Harman superbly embodies Bruce: the little traces of vanity that keep bubbling up, his superficial charm, while always suggesting the suffering that leads him to blow up his life.

Equally, Alex Young digs deep into the tension and misery of being his wife. Her song “Days and Days” becomes a terrifying cry from the heart, a litany of how unhappiness and unresolved secrets can destroy a person. Natasha Cottriall is a sympathetic and dynamic presence as the life-changing Joan.

All in all, this is such a confident and engrossing production of such an absorbing show that it makes you wonder why Fun Home is seen so rarely. It is a remarkable musical.