The Fun Home is not all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, sometimes it’s not funny at all, what with marital discord, hidden secrets and suicide to contend with. The reason partly may be because the fun home is short for the funeral home, the family house doubling as a funeral parlour when not accommodating the young Alison Bechdel.
It’s an apt a metaphor for family dysfunction – for example, how many other children get to hide away in a casket for fun and perform numbers on it as if they were the Jackson 5? Weird surroundings result in weird behaviour.
Adapted from the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel and with superb live musical accompaniment, this is a very shrewd choice of show to stage.
Each family may be unhappy in its way own as Tolstoy says, but the Bechdels are uniquely unhappy. A father who flies into unexplained rages at his wife and children, a mother in denial about her daughter coming out as a lesbian, and a couple unwilling to admit a dark truth in small town Pennsylvania set the stage for a night of high emotion.
If all this sounds wearying, it’s not; the opposite in fact. It is in turns affecting, moving, tragic, funny and wise. To cope with family dynamics, little Alison (Harriet O’Shea) withdraws into television and drawing – her life story growing up is wittily witnessed in captions throughout the show, so that you can almost feel her walking off the pages of a graphic novel.
Her relationship with her father Bruce (brilliantly played by Nigel Harman) is alternately adoring and intensely frustrating. When she goes to college he sends her books, including by Colette. It is only her knowing college girlfriend Joan (Natasha Cottrial) who realises Bruce – himself hiding in plain sight as gay – is trying to tell her something about her sexuality. The adult Alison, played by Alice Audrey O’Hanlon with such winning insouciance that at times she resembles Dougal in Father Ted in her level of innocence about everyday affairs, only belatedly comes to understand her father’s psychological struggles, by which point it is too late.
The musical numbers in the show are sharp and powerful and brim along with zest, scooping up the audience in their enthusiasm. The fine ensemble acting adds to the show’s strong production and while there is a gnawing sense of claustrophobia in the unravelling of events, the dark never quite shades out the light.
Jodie McNee as Alison the graphic novelist is a continuous presence on stage, acting as both chorus and internal monologue for her younger selves, moving around the other actors with wonderment and pity in equal measure. Taking solace from family misfortune in drawing helps Alison process difficult truths in a way everyone will be able relate to.
The Royal Exchange may well have a smash summer hit on its hands.
Fun Home is at The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 3 July to 1 August 2026.