Daughter
Full disclosure: I have never written review before. OK, maybe some amazon reviews here and there, but I just thought this would be fun. Ratings are out of 5 stars.
Daughter - ★★★★ Kings Hall Theatre - Venue 73 - Ticketing Info 12:30 pm Aug 1-5, 8-12, 15-19, 22-26
My flatmate, B, works for one of the PR companies so has got a lot of preview tickets she can give away. This is great, and so she’s sent me a whole list of shows and descriptions to pick out what I want to see. This was not one of those. This was an “I have a ticket for a show in 30 minutes if you can get here, wait I gave you the wrong venue, MOVE MOVE MOVE.” situation. I didn’t even know what show I was seeing.
As expected, everyone at CanadaHub is extremely polite and I went in with a warm fuzzy feeling. There was pop music playing as we filed in, surely this was going to be something feel good! Up Beat! Day time theatre/comedy!
Adam Lazarus is The Father, and takes us in to an autobiographical comedy about fatherhood. He gets everyone in good humour talking about his daughter and how they play together. I relaxed into the seat, chuckling as he played both himself and his daughter in hypothetical conversations and dance battles.
Then there’s that moment where something seems a little off, a little glimmer of anxiety formed and knotted itself in my stomach. The discussion and performance of childbirth, where Lazarus comes across as an almost stereotypical confused but well meaning first time father, lets the comedy transform into and uncomfortable realism.
The narrative vignettes continue, always somewhat relatable initially. They’re easy to laugh at, if only to release some of that anxiety from the previous story. But gradually, the humour fades away and you feel like a man is standing on stage begging you to absolve him of all sins. Halfway through, I was actually gagging, convinced I was going to throw up. As the show rose to climax I was actually crying.
Going into this show I wanted to like this man, be it Lazarus or The Father (I honestly have no idea how true the stories are, and I hope I don’t give anything away by saying I really want them to be fiction). He had lost all sympathy and I felt only revulsion and pity, mostly pity for his family. He reminded me of an emotionally abusive boyfriend who could justify all his behaviour with a joke and some gaslighting.
This disgust on my part is what makes the show so successful. Lazarus draws you into his stories. He successfully paints each scene with a vibrant brush so that the audience is drawn into each story, and can see underneath the friendly suburban dad mask to what might be lurking underneath. As a woman, I found this all too familiar (remember the emotionally abusive boyfriend I mentioned before?), for men it might be a shocking look in the mirror to confront their own behaviour.