Imagine: the date is 1998, Christmas Eve. Bathed under dim yellow lights, your neighbour is in the kitchen making himself a cuppa. He’s there to tend to your backyard as you get ready for work. He drinks his cuppa, then gets on with it; radio in the backyard to keep him company. This is the most any day gets: quiet, comfy, and a little bit boring––sometimes broken up by the excitement of phone calls mistaking your residence for the butchers.

While I wasn’t born before the cultural disruption of mobile phones and phishing scams that was the 2000s, Jack Kearney’s new kitchen-sink drama, ‘Born On A Thursday,’ certainly made me feel like I was. Set across a year (more or less) from the end of 1998 through to 1999, Kearney’s witty and heartfelt script deconstructs the familial struggles that we Aussies love to keep unspoken and unheard.

At the centre of the family struggle is April (Sofia Nolan), as she suddenly returns from her life as a dancer in Denmark and crashes her Sydney home unannounced after 18 months of radio silence. Nolan captures the out-of-sorts eldest daughter of the family well. Often, she acts as the audience surrogate, as keenly interested in tearing open the family’s sealed envelope of her brother Isaac’s (Owen Hasluck) tragic football accident as we are. Her insistence (sometimes a cruel one) in forcing the unspoken to be said is sincere and intense, engaging the audience in the play’s backyard mystery.

As April disrupts the rhythms and traditions rooted in her family, the late 90’s Australian suburbia set constructed by Soham Apte and Angus Nott encapsulates this disruption. Apte and Nott’s set ingeniously tracks the passage of time by the flip of a calendar and changes of the season. A crack in the wall reveals the house’s backyard, where April’s arrival is marked by an unkept garden. Over the course of the play, the garden becomes less unruly as the characters grow accustomed to navigating their family quarrels.

Supporting the family through their quarrels are friends Howard (James Lugton) and Estelle (Deborah Galanos). Lugton plays the affable and caring (perhaps too caring) neighbour, and Galanos the loud and eccentric friend of the mother. The dynamics of both with the family encapsulate what Director Lucy Clements does best. A sharp attention-to-detail given to characters and their small relational idiosyncrasies: vigorous defences when traditions of crossword discussions are challenged, faltering eye contact when Isaac’s football accident is mentioned, and so on.

However, I cannot mention sharp attention-to-detail without also giving my overwhelming praise to Ingrid’s actress Sharon Millerchip. My God, what a performance! Millerchip undeniably elevates this production to soaring heights with her carefully crafted and lived-in performance of an unfaltering mother surviving day-to-day. Closed off and exhausted, yet caring and persistent, Millerchip trims away at the hedges obscuring Ingrid to lay bare her beating heart as she fights fervently for her son to live a normal life.

As seasons change from summer to winter and the backyard is uprooted, so are the family’s quiet assumptions. At times, this leads to severe challenges: screaming matches, unfair compromises, and for many––their darkest moments. But then winter fades into spring: new roots grow, and the world starts to settle. And once the clouds part and the blue sky is seen, we as the audience are left with something familiar. Something quiet and comfy. And although ‘Born On A Thursday’ at the Old Fitz isn’t grandiose and explosive, it is anything but boring.

‘Born On A Thursday’ is playing at the Old Fitzroy Hotel until December 14th.

Photo Credit: Phil Erbacher