In Mog on Fox Night by Judith Kerr, the family cat would prefer an egg to the fish in her bowl but grumpy Mr Thomas insists Mog finish what she’s been given. This, bizarrely, is the same bitter dispute that motors Bill Naughton’s Bolton drama in which Hilda Crompton returns home tipsy on a Friday night and the prospect of herring for tea turns her stomach. Her father Rafe nixes an alternative from mother Daisy (“there’s no fried eggs coming on the scene!”) and the uneaten herring causes trouble all weekend.
Lotte Wakeham’s in-the-round production brings us snugly into Katie Scott’s 1960s living-room set, with clustered photo frames hanging above. They contain the kind of wedding snaps that grow familiar as wallpaper to a family but Naughton shows how long it naturally takes us to fully appreciate the daily ins and outs of our parents’ lives, especially before they had children. The most touching moment comes when the restrained Rafe says his offspring will understand his love when they tend a sick infant of their own.
The Who’s My Generation succinctly sets the tone as Hilda and her siblings enjoy a surreptitious smoke and a gossip magazine, conspiratorially moaning about their dad. Les Dennis’s Rafe, markedly older than written by Naughton, arrives with nostrils twitching and ears pricked, ready to root out misdemeanour. When he later says he can smell rebellion it is spoken with pride. Dennis wields a bookmark, as if conducting himself, when reading aloud a Shakespeare sonnet; Rafe is a self-made man, ever anxious of what he may lose.
This indelible performance is matched by Mina Anwar whose Daisy veers between fidgety-fingered tactician and hands-off onlooker. Natalie Blair gives a remarkable debut as the glowering yet fragile Hilda, whose stubbornness is as much passed down from Rafe as the principles that drive her sister Florence (Monica Sagar) and the grandstanding nature of her brother Harold (Charlie Ryan).
With Gabriel Clark as a sunny but sensitive second brother, the younger cast become thoroughly convincing siblings, ribbing and defending each other while Adam Fenton delivers a pragmatic marriage proposal as Florence’s beau and Isabel Ford brings combustion as a crafty neighbour.
If the comedy becomes overegged and Rafe’s transformation is too tidy, it nevertheless affectingly considers one family’s code of conduct and the importance of the spirit, rather than the letter, of that law. The only disappointment is the lacklustre appearance of this family’s own herring-loving mog, hidden in a pet carrier.
At the Octagon, Bolton, until 4 March.
