Daddy's Girls

From Miranda and Prospero to Major Barbara, the father-daughter relationship has provided a rich theme for playwrights

PLAYS, like London buses, often come along in pairs. One night I was at the Young Vic watching Fun Home, an American musical based on a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel about her relationship with her father, the next I was at the Jermyn Street Theatre seeing The Play About My Dad by Boo Killebrew, a no less personal piece about a father-daughter reconciliation achieved through the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Is it merely coincidence? Or is there something about dads and daughters that, down the ages, has made for good drama?

Some years ago, my critical colleague Benedict Nightingale spent a season in New York and was struck by how many plays revolved around young adults struggling to break free from doting parents; he even coined a phrase, ‘diaper drama’, to describe the phenomenon. However, it’s fair to say that Fun Home and The Play About My Dad are better than that.

The former is a moving and intelligent musical, with a score by Jeanine Tesori, in which the lesbian heroine’s self-discovery coincides with the realisation that her father was secretly homosexual. If Fun Home is about the lies and evasions of family life, The Play About My Dad is altogether more optimistic.

Both shows, directed by Sam Gold and Stella Powell-Jones respectively, are well worth a look and set me thinking about the way the bond between fathers and daughters has inspired dramatists for centuries. I was struck by the director John Burgess’s observation, in The Faber Pocket Guide to Greek and Roman Drama, that it’s simply untrue to say the loving nuclear family is a relatively modern phenomenon.

He points to Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, where the heroine runs impulsively into her father’s arms, only later realising that Agamemnon has to face the Greek army’s demand that she be killed to achieve a fair wind to Troy.