Returning to a Fun Home – Sarah Frankcom on why Manchester is perfect for the regional premiere

Fun Home is a memory play, and it unlocks an entire world for director Sarah Frankcom.

Invited back to the Royal Exchange, where she served as artistic director for over ten years, the title is one she has always wanted to direct: “I think everyone wanted to get their hands on it!” she recalls, after it had its UK premiere at the Young Vic in 2018.

“I’m a gay woman making theatre, and I love this show. It puts representation at its centre in such an understated but profound way,” she starts. “I also love the fact that this show finishes with three female performers all playing the same character, who have all had major life moments that as an audience we’ve been privileged to be part of.”

Marking 20 years since the release of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, the Tony Award-winning musical adaptation by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron is being performed regionally in the UK for the very first time.

Bechdel grew up in rural Pennsylvania, where her family ran the local funeral home. In the musical, she sings about how she can draw a circle around the places that her father has lived, but the journey and experiences transcend geography. “Manchester has a massive queer community, but I’m always struck by the journeys that people make for themselves to get to that community. Sometimes they only need to go ten miles down the road, but that journey is enormous.”

For Frankcom, some of the most powerful moments in the sung-through show are when things are said aloud for the first time. “I think it manages to give insight into the extraordinary moments when you realise more about yourself and who you are and who you might be for the rest of your life.”

The writing does this in a way that she says is “pure but direct… it allows the moments to be those moments.” Within the story, which narrates a young woman’s sexual awakening and realisation of her dad’s hidden life and tragic end, it deals with great heartbreak and pain, “but it also has unexpected and beautiful moments of celebration and liberation.”

Having three performers – Jodie McNee, Alice Audrey O’Hanlon and a rotating cast of young performers – takes the beginning of feeling different or other, and gifts “the universal experience of seeing an older version of the adult that you might become.” Frankcom explains: “I think it’s a universal experience for anybody who has grown up feeling different – not in terms of sexuality, it’s bigger than that.”

This joyfulness is something that resonates so beautifully with the show receiving its northern premiere, as both towns share similar humour and heart. It’s why Frankcom thinks the play suits the Royal Exchange’s round so well. “Our key question has been how we relate how memory works with how creativity works. [We’ve been] creating a visual language and trying to capture between the lines while sometimes summoning memories, sometimes being blindsided by them, and sometimes being able to edit them or stop them, or being overwhelmed by the past.”

The result is an “imaginative space which is really Alison’s past, present and future and also where her imagination is realised,” she says, adding that “The 360-degree space always has a past, present and future in it. It can be poetic or it can be epic, but it can be very specific – [Fun Home] is Alison accessing memories to create a piece of art and to try to understand things and face things she has been avoiding or repressing.”

Frankcom knew the novel before she fell in love with the musical, and says, “The more time I’ve spent with it, the more it gives me. Every time I go back and read it, I see different things in it.”

The director adds: “There are so many little hidden treats and surprises and things that you maybe miss the first or second time you read it. I think that the round can be a bit like that. Not everybody sees the same thing at the same time. Sometimes you have to make a show where there are little surprises and little treats for only a few people.”

Returning to the theatre, Frankcom feels “a sense of completion in this for me,” having finally staged the title she has yearned for many years. “I do feel a sense of ending and beginning, actually.”

“The thing about the Royal Exchange is it’s always so much bigger than you as a director. I’ve spent a huge amount of my creative life in that space and it never ceased to be. I found something new out every time I’ve made something in there.”

Fun Home is part of the theatre’s 50th anniversary, celebrated with the theme of homecoming. “What I’m really enjoying at the moment is seeing a whole new range of people come back and trying to make sense of it as well.

“It’s really exciting to see the energy, the imagination and the boldness of Selina Cartmell to come in and push the rules.”