In their own words: Wrong Way Grow Back
There are things Ben Grant never knew about his parents, including the tenderness they struggled to express. Discovered after their deaths, their letters form the basis of this disarmingly funny exploration of family, grief and the peculiar intimacy of reading words never intended for you.
Ben Grant is having an argument on the phone. Why must audiences be warned about everything they are going to see? What happened to theatrical surprise? He hangs up and offers a list of things his show won't contain, including fat jokes, homophobia and readings from his mother's letters. It soon becomes clear that he intends to deliver the lot.
This is a mischievous beginning to Wrong Way Grow Back, a solo show at La Mama HQ in which Grant examines the lives of his late parents through letters discovered after their deaths. His humour is dry, fiercely intelligent, occasionally outrageous and frequently directed at himself. A gay Jewish man who can pass unnoticed as either, he jokes about identity, politics and the peculiar hypocrisies of public morality. There is a false beard and a Louis C.K. impersonation. Thankfully, he is good company, with an easy manner that disarms us even as his jokes rattle our metaphorical cage.
His parents, Joan and Bruce, had what he calls “unstraightforward lives”. Bruce was a journalist and theatre critic, an Australian adventurer who witnessed Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll arriving in London. Joan was an academic from a Jewish family of poets, musicians and scholars, whose history included devastating losses in the Holocaust. She loved to sing Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Judy Garland. Their marriage brought love, children, depression, infidelity and eventually divorce. Both later found other partners, and with them, a little more happiness.
The correspondence can be startling in its candour. Passages appear on a small screen, revealing a Bruce capable of expressing tenderness that his son never experienced. Grant wishes he could have known this side of his father. It is a small, painful admission, made without fuss. The letters also disclose Joan's complicated family relationships and the difficulties of a marriage in which affection was not always enough.
Grant imagines himself as an analogue recording of his parents, their separate tracks preserved in him. The hiss and crackle of vinyl recur, while the typewritten letters evoke a time when communication across continents demanded patience and offered considerable privacy. There is a pleasing irony in Grant making these private exchanges public. He also celebrates theatre as a kind of analogue encounter, with performer and audience sharing the same air, close enough, he points out, to smell one another.
The staging is spare, with projected text, shifts in lighting and a microphone used to mark changes in register. Under Christian Leavesley's direction, the shifts between stand-up, family recollection and song are handled with an easy fluency. Bronwyn Pringle's lighting is especially lovely in the musical passages, finding an intimate warmth.
Then comes the admission that changes the evening. Grant can joke about his father, his relatives and himself, but not, it seems, his mother. Having spent much of the show mocking the rules about what comedians may say, he encounters a restriction of his own. His reluctance is more affecting than any declaration of grief.
Towards the end, Grant turns increasingly to song. He performs music associated with his parents, including a reworking of “Danny Boy” as “Daddy Boy”, with his father's smoking pipe in hand. His singing is modest and touching. Joan's musical inheritance is audible in her son's attempts to recover something of her presence.
The performance grows quieter, though its humour remains. I found my eyes welling through much of the second half, tears accumulating and eventually spilling over during the jokes. Grant's comedy seems to catch me at precisely the moments when I am least prepared for it.
Wrong Way Grow Back is a beautifully accomplished piece of autobiographical theatre, funny, exquisitely vulnerable and attentive to the imperfect ways people live and love one another. The letters offer Grant a fuller understanding of his parents, including aspects of their lives that he could scarcely have imagined while they were alive. There is something rather wonderful about being allowed to share in these discoveries. What a privilege to have met them.
Wrong Way Grow Back plays at La Mama HQ until 18 October 2026, as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to Wrong Way Grow Back was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.
