The first Sunday of these New Theatre productions has free entry for students and the unwaged, that's why I went. The spiel for this show was:
A war is over. Or maybe not?
There are demonstrations on the streets, politicians are publishing self-help books, and children are left unsupervised in concrete playgrounds. From this chaos, parroting the ways of adults as observed by the uncritical and receptive hearts of children, springs a game called Family Stories.
Four adult actors play children who in turn play mums, dads, sons and daughters in a cyclical family saga spanning a decade of civil war. Every scene is a metaphor for the fear that results from living in a society without free media or civil liberties under a government at war with itself.
Family Stories is a game of 'playing house' that becomes a thrilling, hilarious, devastating allegory of a post-war society.
I found the "metaphor" somewhat threadbare; it was as if we were voyeurs in a stereotyped and somewhat violent Serbian household where the entreaty to stop thinking and articulating (to ease survival in a police state) was both predictable and non-unique to the troubled time of the former Yugoslavia. The gibbering dog / broken girl was a curiosity that went under-used and unresolved, perhaps providing a link with New Theatre's previous show, The Man Who.