It’s a pretty familiar scene for just about everyone: family dinner. Some families do it every night, some maybe once a fortnight, if that. Or just when everyone’s free. Y’know, if you can make it, it’d be really lovely to have you over – mum’s making roast lamb. It’s tradition, the family get-together, everyone has a bit of a laugh, your mum will have a crack at you for swearing so much, and you’ll leave having eaten a bit more than you should have.
For Peach Cobbler, you’re led in to someone’s dining room, and it’s instantly familiar to you. Mum hands you some crockery – don’t just stand there, go help your brother set the table. Dad’s already sitting there, craning his neck to watch the T.V. on in the living room. Your sister is there, having had to move back home for a bit, but can we not talk about that? Do you have to bring that up? Here, open this bottle of wine.
This isn’t the Joker hanging out of a police car window, and here… we… go-style, though. This is just family dinner. Over the next three-quarters of an hour, playwright Laura Desmond’s family’s dirty laundry gets aired – brother Dan, father Gary, Carol, the matriarch trying to hold it all together, and Georgia, back living at home for a while. You get the feeling that this dirty laundry never really gets washed, and the topics of conversation – light, airy dinnertime subjects such as why feminism has gone too far, nationalism, misogyny, how it’s unfair that indigenous students always seem to be getting handouts – aren’t exactly on their first lap around the washing machine, and definitely aren’t on their last. That’s what gets to you about this show, the excruciating familiarity of it all, how you instantly know these people, how you don’t realise you’ve been clenching your jaw for twenty minutes. And then it ends, gradually, but suddenly. A long, drawn-out abruptness.
This show is like sitting on a chair that’s tilted fifteen degrees too far in one direction, at a desk that’s tilted fifteen degrees too far in the opposite direction. The light is 15% too bright or too dark, and the window just won’t open enough to get any of the breeze through – just like some family dinners you’ve absolutely been to, having to listen to racist aunt Mary or Uncle Dave who thinks that girls really should behave or dress in a certain way if they want to be taken seriously.
There isn’t a whole lot of things I’d give five stars to; Jawbreaker’s 1993 album 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, inter dismantling Barcelona in 2010, The Puma Suede… But this show is definitely one of them.
5 / 5 stars
Words by Mikey Della Porta
Peach Cobbler is on until March 13
For more information and to book tickets, click here
Tulpa Magazine 