Once We Lived Here – King’s Head Theatre

Belinda Wollaston, Iestyn Arwel and Melle Stewart in Once We Lived Here at the King’s Head Theatre, London. Picture: Roy Tan

Once We Lived Here continues at the King’s Head Theatre, London until 26 April.

A musical based on the gritty, dour reality of family life and interwoven personal problems on a remote sheep shearing station in Australia doesn’t seem the most promising scenario for a joyous night out.

Certainly, for the most part, Act I of Dean Bryant and Mathew Frank’s Once We Lived Here, getting its European premiere at the King’s Head Theatre in a new production directed by Dean Bryant, struggles to engage or entertain enough to make you care too much about the entanglements and tensions within the McPherson brood. Thankfully though, a couple of decent musical numbers, including the gutsy ‘The Shearing Shed’, bolster the somewhat tentative and plodding banter between family members.

As Lecy, the fashionable, high-living floosie come back temporarily to the family home, Belinda Wollaston, provides much-needed nuggets of humour in a pretty drab first half hour. It’s hard not to warm to a character that asks her sibling: “Have you experimented with tofu?” The vocal passion that Melle Stewart puts into her character Amy’s musical numbers, as the pump-fixing, dungaree-wearing daughter who never left Emoh Ruo (Our Home backwards), is impressive. As is the curious pseudo Vivienne Westwood woollen jumper sported by son Shaun, played by Iestyn Arwel, his attire being as threadbare as his character’s grip on sanity at some points in the drama.

The arrival of ‘outsider’ Burke who puts the cat among the Kookaburras, is key to the dramatic mix, and Shaun Rennie excels and provides the most impressive, natural and rounded musical performance of the evening.

Cue the opening of Act II, and thankfully here is some much-needed levity in the form of well-executed skit, ‘We Like It That Way’. Unexpected, great fun and as refreshing, this immediately raises the entertainment bar and completely re-engages the interest.

It doesn’t matter that what follows is a calamitous bush fire and the – spoiler alert! – eventual death of cancer-stricken, ‘tough as old boots’ matriarch, Claire, played with dignity and steely determination by Simone Craddock, as the human spirit eventually wins with the resolution of most issues.

Ultimately, at times watching this feels like hard work. It could lose a couple of the less inspired tunes, a depressing storyline or two and even the interval break. Aussies, after all, are famed for their humour – this just needs a few more laughs, preferably in musical form.

Derek Smith