Family Snaps

Family Snaps
The Garage, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: Gresham's Youth Theatre

Taff Llewellyn

This is a play about family breakdown and the devastating effect that it has on young children. Played beautifully by a troupe of pre-teenage actors, and minimally-staged, the play addresses the issue of divorce, and the effects of family break-up on the lives of the children involved.

Written as a group piece and apparently developed through workshops with the players (no author is cited), the play deals with traumatic issues… traumatically.

This play is so moralistic, so tragic, so gob-smackingly, in-yer-facedly painful … that I couldn't help laughing. And not a defensive laugh of recognition; not an embarrassed chuckle of self-denial; not a contemptuous snort of thinly-veiled guilt - but a fully blown chortle of disbelief. However, by half-way through, even I was quite engaged, and at the end, I was almost convinced to join the rest of the entire audience - who were blubbering like babies - in their standing ovation.

From the beginning, when we all filtered into the theatre to the strains of Pink's 'Family Portrait', to the stage opening with 'Misere' until the close with 'The Lord's My Shepherd', this was a relentless, one-dimensional tract against parents who 'damage' their kids by having the temerity to split up. No other message is countenanced.

The 'connection' to, and by, the audience is either in the style of reality TV (reflecting back our own lives in an unmediated way) or romantic tears of empathetic 'recognition'. After all - these poor, poor children. Transpose the words 'starving Ethiopian' or 'orphaned Bosnian' and you could ellicit the same emotional response. This is a manipulative play, but, at the same time, it is very interesting to find yourself being manipulated.

Dad's new girlfriend is a grasping bitch; mum's new boyfriend is a potential child molester. Trust no-one. And the adults in the audience are constantly reminded - through the children's innocent perception of their complicity in their parents' breakup - of the damage that we do to children if we do not repay their trust with our total dedication to the marriage vows.

The 'message' (for this is agitprop without the props), is compounded by a relentless religiosity. The bizarre use of Biblical references in almost every other sentence left me thinking that I'd had a narrow escape from a sect. The fact that there are gratuitous references to Princess Di might also give anl indication of the morbid plot devices.

The writer reassured me that this was not a religious play - suggesting that it was a device to connect with children who still believe in 'Father Christmas, wizards and Jesus', but I'm not convinced. Not that a religious play is necessarily a problem. It's just that this one bombarded a single issue and allowed to scope for alternative perspectives or one single solitary positive story (that children might benefit - as the have over generations - from the break up of their biological families)

'Pompous' and 'didactic' are words that spring to mind, although 'intriguing' and 'controversial' also describe the work. At the end - symbolic of children everywhere - one of the children hangs himself. I felt like joining him.

10 August to 15 August.