A Christmas setting (at first) suggests were in for Silly Season fare, but Jack Kearney’s Born on a Thursday is anything but.

The play takes us back to December 1998, into a suburban Sydney home and a way of life that feels closer to the 1950s than to the present. There are no smartphones, no computers, no Wi-Fi. Christmas music drifts from a radio-cassette, as does the cricket. Neighbours drop by unannounced (imagine that!) with no text message for permission. Coffee is instant though tea – loose-leaf only – is the ritual.

Into this limps a prodigal daughter, April (Sofia Nolan), returning after four years in Denmark with a dance company – years in which she didn’t call home, even when her brother Isaac (Owen Hasluck) lay in a coma after a catastrophic sporting injury. Her mother, Ingrid (Sharon Millerchip), gives her the coldest of shoulders. 

Sharon Millerchip and James Lugton in Born on a Thursday. Photo © Phil Erbacher

At first, it looks like we’re in familiar territory: the fraught family Christmas reunion. But as the months pass – marked by the cast flipping of calendar pages – this proves...