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Fun Home

Bechdel’s touching testament to queer love
by
ABR Arts 14 February 2022

Fun Home

Bechdel’s touching testament to queer love
by
ABR Arts 14 February 2022
Photograph by Jeff Busby
Photograph by Jeff Busby

Vladimir Nabokov, in his exquisite autobiographical work Speak, Memory (1967), says that ‘the prison of time is spherical and without exits’. It is an idea that animates Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home (2006), moving as it does in circular motions, enfolding its characters in an endless orbital spin through the years. Perhaps memory itself is like this, forever returning to our consciousness the painful and joyous things we’d thought we’d left behind, like moons in retrograde. It is no accident that the show’s opening number is titled ‘It All Comes Back’.

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