Claudio Tolcachir’s award-winning play, first produced in Buenos Aires in 2005, completes the Ustinov’s impressive season of premieres from the Americas. According to the programme, the piece was developed over months by a group of young artists working together in Tolcachir’s house, which he had transformed into a theatre and acting school. The end result shows the strengths and weaknesses of that way of working: powerful characterisations and zippy dialogue set in a hash-bash structure.
Director Laurence Boswell makes the most of the pluses, deftly orchestrating tensions and deploying a cracking cast to maximum advantage. Stella Feehily’s adaptation (set, for reasons unexplained, in the Republic of Ireland) gives the actors punchy, rhythmic language to play with - they seize it with relish (special mention to Laoisha O’Callaghan’s Mary and Rowan Polonski’s Marko).
Under one roof, three adult generations of the socially disadvantaged Coleman family live lives that are described as “chaotic” if you are poor and hungry, but “interesting” if you are rich and starving yourself thin. As one character puts it: “We are a normal family – with issues.” Granny, her daughter Mary, Mary’s twins, Damian and Gaby, and their half-brother, Marko (who has particular “behavioural issues”) express their shifting antagonisms through horseplay bordering on violence.
Only Granny commands the love and respect of all, including Marko’s sister: separated from the family by her father while a baby, raised in affluent circumstances and now a successful businesswoman, Veronica is an occasional visitor to the family home-cum-battlefield. When Granny is taken to hospital, the quasi-farcical action, now spliced with melodrama, becomes increasingly mechanical and plot-driven. The impression that the characters are being manipulated for the benefit of a well-fed audience is intensified by a forced-feeling ending aiming at Chekhovian pathos.
• The Omission of the Family Coleman is at the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath, until 27 April
