A Christmas setting (at first) suggests were in for Silly Season fare, but Jack Kearney’s Born on the 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 only a starting point. The play becomes a portrait of a family bowed under unspoken hurts and old slights, tangled in grief and guilt. More than anything – and thanks largely to Ingrid’s emotional dominance – they are a family who struggle to express love.

Alfred Hitchcock once said, “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.” Kearney pointedly leaves some of those bits in. His dialogue feels unvarnished, true to time and place.

Director Lucy Clements navigates the shifts in mood very capably and makes good with the play’s flashes of earthy humour – much of it courtesy of Howard (James Lugton), the bloke from over the road who has maintained a constant vigil over Ingrid and her family for years, and Ingrid’s chum Estelle – played in winning style by Deborah Galanos.

Owen Hasluck and Sofia Nolan in Born on a Thursday. Photo © Phil Erbacher

Millerchip is outstanding. Her Ingrid is brittle, funny, obtuse and wounded in ways she herself barely understands. Nolan brings an affecting blend of surly defensiveness and yearning to April. Hasluck plays the frustrated Isaac with commendale delicacy, avoiding sentimentality. 

Soham Apte’s intricate design is the 1990s on a stick – enough to give anyone used to the standards of contemporary domestic minimalism the ick. Meshed with Veronique Benett’s thoughtful lighting, Sam Chen’s busy but well-integrated sound design conjures a suburban summer and the passing of the seasons.

Born on a Thursday isn’t a ‘big play’. It’s a modest, humane kitchen-sink drama about a family trying – and mostly failing – to say what they mean and live up to their promises. But its gentleness accumulates power. By the time the final scene arrives, the play has quietly, movingly steered itself somewhere tender and true.

Born on a Thursday plays at the Old Fitzroy Theatre until 14 December.