Fifty Ways to leave your father

Family tensions run high when Jason and Sarah find themselves living back at home with their father, Richard. Sarah puts too much butter on her bread and doesn't pay rent; Jason is grumpy and is behind on his rent. Richard is controlling and keeps talking about rent. As mild annoyance becomes murderous intent, family skeletons come knocking and Jason and Sarah count the Fifty Ways To Leave (or kill) Your Father, in this black comedy from Tristan Stone, looking at the discords arising from grown up children having to live with their parents (or parents having to contend with their grown up children still living with them) – in a period of economic instability.

Drawing inspiration from Arthur Millar’s Death of a Salesman Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Philip Larkin’s infamous poem, This Be The Verse, Stone sketches a comic, yet realistic, look inside a family unit, with its share of secrets.

Whether you empathise with the young adults or the parents, there are clearly faults on both sides and you will find your sympathies switching from one character to another as swiftly as the characters themselves.

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The play was first performed on 28th May 2011 at the Sarah Thorne Memorial Theatre, Broadstairs.  

You can view the original programme here.