Fun Home at The Royal Exchange

In 1998, Sarah Frankcom arrived at a theatre with a distinguished history and a settled idea of what belonged on its stage – filtered, in her own words, through “a particular and rigid white, male lens.” She spent the next 20 years helping make the Royal Exchange braver, future-facing, and more representative. These values continue to define the theatre, not least in Artistic Director Selina Cartmell’s ambitious A Homecoming anniversary season, which brings Frankcom back to direct a musical that belongs in the theatre she helped shape.

Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home explores what it means to be queer, and what it costs when you can’t be. When it was first published, some found it threatening. A South Carolina college that assigned it as freshman reading prompted the state legislature to try to cut their funding – suppression dressed up as budget management. Others – many others – found it laudable. Time magazine named it the best book of that year. Not best graphic novel, best book. For both camps, the reasoning was the same: this was a queer life rendered ordinary, literary, worthy of study.

First adapted for the stage by Lisa Kron and composer Jeanine Tesori, and premiering in New York in 2013, the musical follows its protagonist at three stages of her life: as a child in her family’s rural Pennsylvania funeral home, as a college student discovering her sexuality, and as an adult cartoonist reconstructing the past. At the centre is her father Bruce: brilliant, volatile, a man who spent his life trying to reconcile who he was with who he believed he had to be, obsessively restoring a house he couldn’t quite inhabit honestly. Four months after Alison comes out to her parents, Bruce is killed by a truck in circumstances she suspects were intentional. A tale of queer tragedy and queer joy, Fun Home is the act of looking back – at the silences, the secrets, the love that never found its form.

Tesori’s score – described by the New York Times as her “best and most varied” – doesn’t work like a conventional musical. Emotions aren’t announced; the songs are more like thoughts that haven’t quite caught up with feelings. The melodies, sometimes sweet but often prickly with tension, refuse resolution, reflecting a family that can’t quite tell the truth about itself. It won the Tony for Best Score – one of five including Best Musical. Rolling Stone called it “one of the most important musicals of the 21st century.” Its 2018 London premiere earned Olivier nominations and a run of five-star reviews. You get the picture.

The show’s regional premiere isn’t a transfer; this is a new production brought to the Royal Exchange’s iconic round – the audience encircling the action as Alison encircles her own past. And it arrives in the hands of a director who knows this building intimately. This is Frankcom’s 30th production for the Royal Exchange – a streak that’s included a landmark female Hamlet with Maxine Peake, a play about the hate crime murder of Sophie Lancaster, and a new Simon Stephens play scored by Jarvis Cocker. “I could never have run another theatre,” she has said. “It doesn’t get any better than leading that company.”

Frankcom isn’t the only one making a Homecoming. Opposite Olivier award-winning Nigel Harman as Bruce, Alison is played by Jodie McNee, a Royal Exchange regular who has appeared here many times before – including in A Taste of Honey, where she performed alongside Natasha Cottriall, who plays Joan in this play. Designer Peter Butler also makes a welcome return, last working here on the critically-acclaimed Abigail’s Party.

There’s something resonant about Frankcom directing this particular show. Fun Home is about what happens when a family organises itself around not seeing what’s plainly there. Frankcom spent 20 years doing the opposite, gradually expanding what and who the Royal Exchange was for, and helping lay the foundations for a theatre that, 50 years in, is producing some of the most ambitious work in its history.

Manchester has waited eight years to hear this story. Everything points to it being worth the wait.