When Cassie and her younger sisters are on a family bowling trip, their mum goes to buy slushies and disappears. Cassie is used to her erratic behaviour and covers as usual, reassuring Tin and Kit that she’ll return any minute. Except this time she doesn’t, and Cassie has to keep up the role of parent for months not minutes. The uncertainty remains a constant.
Alex Howarth, directing and designing his own drama for the company Patch of Blue, stages this episode as a play within the play. That it’s told with a sock puppet, a cuddly toy and Mr Potato Head, with the neon bowling alley popping up inside a suitcase, reveals a lot about his production’s homemade quality. On a set framed by a sheet and a washing line of clothes, this show authentically springs from the children’s sticky-fingered world. You sense the ice-cream dribbles and the Pritt Stick residue on Kit’s forehead from a school experiment gone awry.
With extremely affecting, delineated performances, Alex Brain (Cassie), Michaela Murphy (Tin) and Emily McGlynn (Kit) guide us gently through the story as seen from each child’s perspective. Kit, the youngest, focuses on the presents Mum might bring back from her “holiday”; Cassie sidelines her teenage dreams and shifts straight into multitasking middle age.
The adult characters are either heard in voiceover (for social workers and foster carers Mark and Alice) or, most powerfully, represented by the audience (when Cassie makes the case to us that she should become her sisters’ legal guardian). We are directly asked for our own notions of what makes a family. Mark and Alice are kind even if their house doesn’t smell like the girls’ own; Cassie knows her sisters inside out but is it fair on her that she should take full responsibility for them? Repeatedly, the play asks: what is enough for one person? And what is too much?
This difficult material, taken from true stories, is handled with off-centre humour. Mark “thinks Ariana Grande is something you get at Starbucks”; Kit lets an audience member wear her frog hat during an upsetting scene. Ellie and Imogen Mason’s electronic music, played live, heightens the lighting design by Rachel Sampley. A constellation of sources capture the glow of sisterly support while also (at one point literally) catching them in the headlights.
The script’s potent metaphor of the trinary star system could afford not to be repeated at the end but this is a thoughtful, warm, hugely moving hour that will leave you wanting to call whomever it is you think of as family.
At Underbelly, Edinburgh, until 28 August.
