Ivan Faute’s Family Dynamics of the Recluse, with Interpretative Dance Breaks plays the Hope Theatre as part of their 2025 Write Club Festival
“You’ll never believe what just happened”
As promised in the title, Family Dynamics of the Recluse, with Interpretative Dance Breaks opens to the strains of the ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ with the company prancing onto the stage with mini beach balls. It’s an arresting beginning to be sure and sets the scene for a rather diverting hour from the pen of Ivan Faute (whose On Arriving still lingers in my mind as one of the VAULT’s best), playing at the Hope Theatre as part of their new writing festival Write Club.
In her brightly coloured blazer, Dr Margaret Weather is a striking figure. An ambitious therapist (“I want to be more famous than Pavlov’s dog”), she isn’t surprised when she’s invited to apply for and subsequently receives a major grant to write a book about her “prize patient” Elvin and his closer relationship with his mother Celina. But beckoned into a meeting with her mentor, the grant-giving Dr Speares, his suggestions that her research studies would benefit from some external stimuli, for instance inserting his own patient Angela into Elvin’s family dynamic, call ethics seriously into question.
What follows is absurd, rather than full-on absurdist. As she explains away any moral quandaries Celina may have using her piles of laundry as an example, Margaret soon realises that her meddling has resulted in a major loss of control and no number of meditations or affirmations are going to help. To say much more would risk spoiler territory but safe to say that Phoebe Batteson-Brown’s increasingly manic performance is vividly effective in this intimate space.
Amelia Sciandra’s production revels in the theatricality of Faute’s construction – those interpretative dance breaks increasingly played as mini psychodramas for the characters – and there’s the beginnings of something really interesting in what the play has to say about therapy and the ethics surrounding it, from the perspective of both therapist and client.