From the Sydney Morning Herald, page 20, 13 October 1986.
Earthy Honesty Keeps Soap Opera at Bay by H.G Kippax.
A FACTUAL description of the characters and incidents of this English north-country family play, with a story running from the outbreak of war in 1939 to victory in 1945, could easily be misleading.
It could make it sound like a soap opera, with its episodes of meetings, partings and reunions, of crises, national and domestic (but mainly domestic), its set-pieces of humour and pathos, and its string of popular tunes tinkled out by dad at the family piano. Worse, such a description could make it sound like one peculiarly English species of soap opera replete with understated but insistent self-congratulation. It could make it sound awful.
Well, it isn't awful. It is good entertainment. It is also true to life, often unexpectedly so. It is full of common sense and a relish for folk and for folk ways - here those of a Catholic working-class family in Newcastle-on-Tyne. It's war, though pervasive it is a far away background; there are no deaths, no conventional heroism, not even (despite the air raids)much physical hardship. There is no case of national self-congratulation.
So, though the exotic forms of soap opera are there and the cumulative laughter of its repetitive jokes, and even the schematic functions of sometimes two-dimensional characters, soap opera is held at bay (though sometimes narrowly).
How? By the affection of the author for the people he is celebrating; by his amused and amusing scorn for cant and sentimentality; by the earthy realism of his pithy, unromantic, anticlimactic dialogue. And as well, on the stage of the Opera House by the honesty and conviction of the acting and by the sympathy with the text of Peter Kingston's direction.
At the centre we have George and Peggy and their two daughters - one plain, sensible, with a limp, the mainstay of a family not much gifted with commonsense; the other, pretty, selfish and shallow. Staying with them is old Andy, Peggy's father, a pessimist, a nuisance, and indomitable. To them come two soldiers - young Joyce's suitor, Eric, winning over the trepidation in her calculations with a ring bought for a song in a Glasgow pub; and dapper Norman, with an eye for ugly-duckling Helen.
The rest is as you would expect - but with endings you may not expect - and with the soap opera episodes transformed and illuminated by the growing truth of Anne Tenney as Helen. She is the narrator and the centre of the play which shows us her touching, funny, convincing growth from teenage old-maid to a strong and loving woman. I commend her to you.
The others are good - especially Robert Alexander as dad who becomes a communist, and Pat Thomson as mum, a fanatical daughter of the Vatican. Nicholas Eadie and George Leppard are likeable as the soldiers, Catherine McClements gives a merciless portrait of the awful Joyce and Bob Hornery is a splendid survivor as the lugubrious grandfather.