Playwright William Duignan tells the story of siblings gathering to pack up their father’s home when his decline with Alzheimer’s becomes too much and he needs to go into care. It’s an important story and one so relatable – my sisters and I often talk about helping our (healthy) 82-year-old father move on to the next stage, when he might need to move out of our family home and into a retirement village. We all have different opinions about how we should help Dad and what should happen to him, and this dilemma when adult children turn into their parents’ carers is played out in Duignan’s play, and the Lochburns.

We meet Sir Gus Lochburn, a former celebrated concert pianist, who sits at the grand piano in his sunken living room and plays some of the songs he made a career out of. We meet him as he was, before he developed Alzheimer’s. [More]

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It’s always a treat to be present at the birth of a brand-new creation. William Duignan’s family-gathering play is exquisitely crafted at an experiential level. The title, and the Lochburns, sounds like the tail end of a family band name: ‘Sir Angus, Lady Margaret and the Lochburns’, for example. I guess that’s the idea, given the musical elements.

The premise (slowly revealed so this could be a spoiler) is simple: Margaret has died some time ago, Gus (Sir Angus) is succumbing to dementia and the three adult children, plus the partner of one, have gathered at the family home to pack up the past in preparation for moving Gus into a ‘care facility’.

What sets it apart from most classic family dramas, where backstories are revealed through dialogue, is that recollections of the past are seamlessly integrated into the present action, just as they would be in the minds of those who have gathered. While it may seem unusual on stage, it’s a device that represents everyday human experience. As we go with the flow, the truth and familiarity of it becomes apparent. It’s as if we are spies with surveillance devices that perceive what’s being played out in memories as well as in the present.

Director Andrew Paterson ensures the dual time-frame actions, of the six wonderfully distinctive and richly rendered characters, interweave fluently on Production Designer Meg Rollandi’s impressive and large split-level living room set.

And here I have to note that the dodgy acoustics of Circa One are not being kind in this setting. The wall cladding (of large hanging rubber mats?) does not create the sound-shell effect that unamplified voices usually require. There seem to be dead spots and live spots. Too often lively dialogue we can tell is being authentically felt and expressed is unintelligible. I think some dialogue is intentionally overlapped – resulting in our really wanting to know what they’re saying (what is denied is desired) – but some intimate exchanges between characters are also difficult to understand. Yet every character is crystal clear in other parts of the play.

(I always check with others in these circumstances, to ensure it’s not just me, and in this case a number of people, who were mostly sitting in the first few rows, volunteered their frustrations, variously suggesting better projection and/or articulation are required – or even, maybe, radio mics. I wonder if the credited sound engineers could also consider strategic acoustic baffling.)

That said, the family dynamics resonate strongly and the non-verbal dimensions of their behaviours and interactions communicate well. Individually, in pairs and as an ensemble, the whole cast rises to the play’s inherent challenges with energies and emotions variously contained and expressed, as they capture a range of incidental and momentous private or shared moments at different ages and stages.

Kali Kopae’s Margaret is an enigmatic and ubiquitous presence initially, objectively observing the turmoil from her other dimension then becoming present as a loving, loyal but often stressed wife and mother, and in her element as a fabulous lounge singer. Kopae navigates the transitions with deceptive ease. (What Margaret died of is never mentioned, unless that’s a detail lost in the aforementioned scrambled dialogue.)

Gus – who turns out to be Sir Angus – first appears in white tie splendour as a concert pianist. From this, his happy place, Peter Hambleton becomes a tyrannical piano teacher of his son, a demanding father who is nevertheless able to play silly games with his children, an accompanist for his wife, a composer struggling with a commission. He also becomes a man who is constantly losing things at critical moments and given to sudden outbursts of anger – the ‘early onset’ signs – then, shockingly, a shuffling shell of his former self whose mind we can invariably read while others ignore him. This is Hambleton at his best.

Simon Leary is Jason, the son who has stayed to look after his father after Margaret died. An unwilling pupil at the piano, he took up guitar as a rebellious teenager and now his partner, Sam, played by Jthan Morgan, has moved in with him. They’ve been living together for 18 months. While Jason experiences a full spectrum of emotions when interacting with his siblings and parents, his loving relationship with Sam is solid. And Sam, who has come to feel this is their home too but now feels marginalised, attempts to be the mediator in the sibling spats with mixed results. Both Leary and Morgan inhabit their roles and relationships beautifully.

As the younger sister, Helena – Helz to her siblings – Stella Reid is both a free spirit and emotionally tied to her late mother, her declining father, her siblings and what was their home. She is utterly compelling in whatever realm, age or state she’s in. There’s a hint that she is living, or has lived, in New York.

Hannah Kelly’s Mary, the older sister, presents at first as domineering and bossy – clashing especially with Jason and Sam, not least about their impending wedding – until we realise she is hiding vulnerability. Her marriage to Nick, in a very Christian household, seems to be rocky and her relationship with her rebellious 11 year-old daughter has fomented guilt about the way she treated her own mother. Her response to her brother’s assertion she’ i just like their Dad is a memorable moment.

Another of the play’s many relatable and touching moments finds Jason revealing to Helena the irony of his inability to express his love for his parents until now, when it’s too late.

All the Lochburns, plus Sam, are musical in their own ways and the eclectic range of tunes and songs blend easily into the unfolding action (Musical Director, Hayden Taylor). The different sounds of live and recorded piano may merit some attention, although the point may be that sometimes everyone can hear it and at others it’s just in one character’s memory.

Along with Gus’s penchant for Liszt and Debussy, Margaret’s songs include ‘Perhaps’, ‘You Belong to Me’ and ‘A House is Not a Home’. Helena has a soft spot for ‘Get Happy’ (made famous by Judy Garland). My nostalgia buttons are resoundingly pressed with poignant renditions of ‘I Remember You’ (for me it was the Frank Ifield recording). Everyone gets involved with ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ which breaks out into a full song and dance number that somehow gets away with breaking the ‘subjective reality’ convention. Anyway, it thrills the audience,

Special mention to Lucas Neal’s lighting design, operated by Marshall Rankin. It enlivens the set wonderfully in concert with the changing states of the on-stage ‘realities’. Rollandi’s costume designs are also on point for each character.

In retrospect I find myself wondering what exactly is being packed up and why? Is the house being sold or are Jason and Sam intending to stay on there until Gus dies, in which case is it just the parents’ stuff they’re sorting and packing? Is there any discussion about who might want to keep this or that (which invariably provokes disputes)? Perhaps some of that is embedded in the dialogue we can’t hear or is it just too early to begin to confront the big questions of inheritance?

These concerns aside, and the Lochburns is a stylistically exciting and refreshing play and production.

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