A marine returning weary from war might expect a “welcome home” banner at the least, but when Isaac (Arthur Darvill) gets back to the California house where he was raised he receives a cool welcome and senses change in the air.
His father, Arthur (Andy Williams), who once ruled the roost with his bullying, has had a stroke. His mother, Paige (Ashley McGuire), takes her revenge by dressing him up as a clown, feeding him oestrogen and humiliating him. Paige has swapped household tasks for shadow puppetry, and Isaac’s little sister, Maxine, has grown into a gangly teenager called Max (Griffyn Gilligan), who prefers to be referred to not as him or her but hir. Max reckons the Noah’s ark story is transphobic and that the Mona Lisa proves Leonardo da Vinci was transgender.
Written by Taylor Mac, best known for his extraordinary 24-hour-long performance, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Hir borrows gleefully from the 20th-century tradition of using the American family as a totem for the failed American dream. The dribbling, mumbling Arthur, who thinks “he is lifting the world” when he is barely lifting a finger, lost his job as a plumber to a Chinese-American woman. Think of a Sam Shepard drama but with raging hormones, a heightened sense of the absurd, more than a touch of the grotesque and added gender politics.
It is no surprise when we learn that the house was built on landfill and the stage looks as if every closet has been opened and ransacked. “I’m all about the metaphor now,” declares Paige, and clearly Mac is too, although often to the point of overload.
Nadia Fall’s production is frequently savagely funny but she can’t quite find the right tone for a play that veers between kitchen-sink drama, sitcom and satire, and which often comes across as strenuous and shouty. That is particularly true of Ashley McGuire’s over-emphatic Paige, who in her attempts to liberate her family and build a new future ends up imposing another set of rigidities. Arthur Darvill captures the tragedy of Isaac, who was broken even before he went to war, but it’s an evening that is often as exhausting as it is entertaining.
- At Bush theatre, London, until 22 July. Box office: 020-8743 5050
