Director's
Note: A solstice is an 'apparent standing still of the
sun between two equinoxes'. The Solstice family of Giles
Cooper's ironically titled Happy Family is not a
fanciful invention. We all know people who are apparently
standing still in their attitudes; who have failed to grow up.
The device of an outsider who makes things happen is another
familiar ingredient, but it has a new look in Cooper's hands.
Gregory is a catalyst, but he's neither a knight on a charger,
nor a scoundrel either. Happy Family flamboyantly
resists the temptation to have heroes, villains, or even settled
rights and wrongs. All four of the characters, arguably, have
arrested development. Certainly they want to play only to their
set of rules.
Characters with
the outward appearance of adults, but the nature of children,
can be used with vivid dramatic effect. Giles Cooper's family
threesome have the kind of candid reactions that reveal not just
themselves but others. Unlike proper adults, they speak their
minds always. Thus they truly inhabit the moment. Their
behaviour may be arrested, but it spontaneously elicits the
basic desires and fears of others - and the feelings that most
adults try to hide.
There are
terrible dangers, of course, in refusing to come to terms with
the present and with one's own grown self. At it's most
pessimistic, Happy Family hints that we are all more or
less unequal to those realities. But closer to the play's comic
overtness, Cooper observes, through the Solstices, the sort of
fossilised Englishness we can still laugh at as 'the
Establishment': that big, other Happy Family, with its
ludicrousness, desirability and danger, all at the same time. -
Maria Aitken
