This is My Family – Southwark Playhouse Elephant

Michael Jibson, Gay Soper, Gemma Whelan and Nancy Allsop in This is My Family at Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London. Picture: Mark Senior

This is My Family continues at Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London until 12 July 2025.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

When 13-year-old Nicky enters a competition to win a holiday, she must write an essay about her family. The version she presents is idealised, from describing the moment in which her parents met to presenting her church-going grandma as rebellious enough that she listens to the cricket on her AirPods during services.

Although that version is enough to win her the competition – a family holiday anywhere in the world she might want – the real life family is anything but idealised. Nicky’s teenage brother is either communicating solely through grunts or threatening to move out and live with his girlfriend. Her grandmother is less rebellious and more forgetful than Nicky described, displaying the signs of dementia onset. And Nicky’s uptight mother and hapless father always seem to be bickering.

The comic musical This is My Family by Tim Firth (Calendar Girls, Greatest Days, Our House) premiered in Sheffield in 2013, with that show’s director Daniel Evans reviving it during his tenure at Chichester in 2019. But while this is technically a revival, for many it will be their first experience of Firth’s tale of criss-crossing personal lives, and the combination of elation and disappointment that families can bring.

Unusually for a musical, it is rare that the six-strong cast ever sing in unison. Instead the divergent strands of each character’s lives are presented in Firth’s songs with overlapping lyrics, further illustrating how all the family members often talk at cross purposes, rarely listening to each other.

As put-upon mother Yvonne, Gemma Whelan is the epitome of a harassed suburban mum, whether fretting about getting the right candle for the downstairs loo or quietly wishing that her hypercritical mother-in-law May (Gay Soper) would drop dead. It is easy to believe that she would be brought to the brink of irritation by her husband, Michael Jibson’s Steve, a man whose ambition for DIY and recycling equipment (why buy head torches when you have cycling lamps and an Alice band; who needs a hot tub when you can put a bathtub in the rockery) is in inverse proportion to his technical ability.

Firth’s ear for humour and characters that are so familiar as to skirt with stereotypes stand him in good stead here. From Luke Lambert’s truculent teen Matt to Victoria Elliott as Yvonne’s sexually liberated sister Sian, it feels as if we have encountered versions of these characters many times before. But they all slot together so believably well that their presence bends towards archetypes that we can all recognise instead of hackneyed tropes.

Musically, Firth relies on a persistent melodic theme, with Nancy Allsop’s Nicky repeating her “This is My Family” line throughout. Elsewhere, the chaos ramps up in Act II when Nicky elects to use the competition prize not to send the family to Orlando, Rio or Venice, but to Blackrock Lake, the campsite where her parents first met. As Chloe Lamford’s Act I set design – a charmingly petite wooden house – is swept away, we are transported into a forest of sliver birch trees, among which can be seen musical director Natalie Pound’s seven-piece band.

Act II takes place solely within the campsite, as Nicky attempts to remind her parents of the spark they once had, even while they are trying to put up a tent in the middle of a thunderstorm and with May beginning to lose a grip on the present as her dementia manifests. Soper, charmingly sweet and spiky throughout, reelishes Firth’s vivid writing here, especially as she describes names “peeling off” from her memory.

With additional storm effects added into the mix, Dominic Bilkey’s sound design, already struggling with so many people talking and singing at once, occasionally results in dialogue and lyrics being completely subsumed in the cacophony. The emotional truth of the cast keeps the show on the road, however, with director Vicky Featherstone eliciting a believable sense of family connection.

And that’s the key to This is My Family’s charm. This is Nicky’s family, but there’s something universal to recognise in its charms, its squabbles, its in-jokes and its occasionally buried love. It may not have the brand recognition of some of Firth’s other stage work, but this revival is well deserved and, hopefully, the first of many.

Scott Matthewman