Sarah and Colin

Something that often happens with marital infidelity is that it gets set in the context of sexlessness: of, that is, a marriage having failed, with the most acute sign of that failure being that the husband and wife do not have sex any more.

This wasn’t the case with my parents. I had insomnia from an early age. There are a variety of possible psychological reasons for this, but one thing that definitely didn’t help was the many nights I spent being woken up terrified in my bedroom by the sounds my dad made during sex. As a kid, obviously, I didn’t know that’s what it was. For years, I assumed there was a wounded walrus in my parents’ bedroom. I’ve watched a lot of pornography – really, a lot – and I have never heard a climaxing man make that sound. The only person who I think might make a similar sound to accompany sexual ecstasy is Chewbacca.

Just to give you a clue as to how frightening it was – when I was a teenager, my already-mentioned friend David Gavurin, who I called Dave, stayed over. Key to this story is the information that I wasn’t sleeping in my own bedroom but in my younger brother’s room. Dan wasn’t there, so I was in his room, which contained a reasonably large single bed (whereas mine, even into my late teens, housed a bunk bed, which made sleeping in it with my girlfriend – Janine – bizarre).

I was, at least initially, allowed to bring my girlfriend back to stay the night. My mum was very keen as we grew into teenagers on saying, as evidence of her being a liberated sixties/seventies mother, ‘Don’t worry, when you have girlfriends, they should stay the night here. I don’t mind what goes on as long as I know you are safe under our roof!’ Later, this would go a bit wrong – during the time of no toast, or rather, no one being allowed back in case they ate some, Janine fell under the ban, and I ended up arguing with my mum about this in front of various people and calling her an idiot, and she slapped me in the face and I went and stayed at Janine’s for a week. Which brought its own issues, as her dad was very much not a sixties/seventies suburban sexually liberated type of dad – really, there’s a whole other book to be written in the margins of this one.

But at the time of this story about Dave, it was all fine. Janine was allowed to sleep with me in Dan’s room. A peculiar sentence, but a true one. One of the other things about Dan’s room, apart from it having a bed that it made sense to have sex in, was that although it also adjoined my parents’ bedroom, something about the acoustics of our house meant you were not, if you were sleeping in it, liable to be accosted by quite so much sonic detail of my father’s sexual shouting.

So. Dave was staying over, as was Janine. Dave in my bedroom, Janine and me in Dan’s room. I remember going in to see Dave before he went to bed and saying, ‘Listen, they – my parents – might have sex, and you should know my dad makes some very weird noises …’ He responded in a teenage, bored, Hey, I’m sixteen, I know what sex sounds like manner. O … K … I said, with that ellipsis in my voice, and shrugged – maybe all dads make sounds like that? – and went to Dan’s room. At about three o’clock in the morning, a knock on the door woke me up, confused, and I heard Dave whisper, from outside, ‘Can I come in?’ He opened the door wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt, and even in the half-light I could see he was ashen, white with fear. He said:

‘Dave … I think your mum’s died.’

I stared at him. I pretty much knew already, just from those words, what was happening and how this would play out. But nonetheless, I said:

‘What?’

‘I know it seems unlikely,’ he said, ‘but your dad is making the most incredible noises. Screaming and crying …’

I said: ‘They’re having sex. I told you.’

Dave shook his head. ‘No. Really. These sounds …’ He grew intense. ‘The only time I’ve heard someone make a sound like that … it was my uncle. At my auntie’s funeral. He knelt in her grave and made that …’ Dave raised a terrified finger towards the adjoining wall, ‘… noise.’

I sighed, said, ‘Right …’ and got out of bed. We tiptoed across the landing back to my room and stood, both of us in our boxer shorts, by the bunk bed. After about fifteen seconds, we heard:

‘WRUUGGGHHHAAAGGGKKKKKHHHPPPLLLTTT!’

Or similar.

I said, ‘They’re having sex’, and went back to bed.

These sounds were very disturbing when you didn’t know what they were. It is possible – even though I was breezy with my friend about them – that at some deep level I was damaged by the confusion they would’ve caused at an earlier age. But it wasn’t as disturbing as the time when I was about thirteen and I heard my mum in the next room having sex without my dad. On her own. Doing that activity that, many years later, on live TV she said was a lovely thing to do outside in the open. She made a lot of disturbing sounds while doing this, but the most disturbing, for me, was the one she made right at the end, which was the sound of her screaming, three times – the word David.

I think by then I kind of knew what was going on. Enough at least not to rush in and say, ‘I’m here! I’m here! How can I save you?’

When I did this bit onstage, it got the most extreme reaction of any story in that show. Not the biggest laugh – that would be the reveal of my mother cc’ing her ill-but-still-sexy email to David White to me and Ivor – but the most shocked. It got a big laugh (I’m still enough of a stand-up to need to tell you that) but you could hear in the laugh a sharp intake of breath. Occasionally, it did occur to me – despite my basic lack of filter – to consider whether there were elements of this story I should leave out.

Well, obviously I considered that throughout the process of making the show. Making any comedy show involves leaving many things out – primarily things that in the telling onstage do not get laughs. I tried out My Family: Not the Sitcom many times before it became the show that opened at the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2016, and it continued to change throughout the two years I performed it in the West End and all over the world. What people noticed was its honesty. See below:

As it happens, I’m not being completely honest here, as I don’t really think you need to have that specific visual evidence to corroborate the information that honesty is what people took away from the show. Clearly, I’ve knowingly included the screenshot of the good review I got from Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington, because I want you to see it. Similarly, earlier in this piece, you didn’t need to know that My Family: Not the Sitcom had a long run in the West End, followed by tours in Australia and Canada. Or that it was nominated for an Olivier award.

As a self-proclaimed honesty addict, let me also tell you about the one bad review this show got, from Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail, who considered it a form of ‘revenge’. It made him feel sad for my family. Interestingly, because I’ve been in therapy for a long time, I’m prepared to give this idea the time of day. It is entirely possible my over-honesty about my parents is a form of revenge. I think it’s possible some of the anger I may have towards them for their unbounded non-parenting when I was younger has got sublimated into comedy. But the truth is always complex. Because I think in that sublimation, revenge gets mixed with memory and the softening that comes with time.

I did leave some things out of that show. I left out – I see I’m not doing it now – the time my dad burst into tears in our kitchen, apparently triggered by the pressure of having to read out some Hebrew at the synagogue at my younger brother’s bar mitzvah, but almost definitely actually triggered by being made redundant at the same time as, however much he was not noticing the details, knowing something was going very wrong with his marriage. I was in the adjoining room (the breakfast room). It was the only time I was ever aware of him crying, and still now, as I think of it, I find it strange and unsettling and upsetting. The noise he made was weirdly similar to the wounded walrus sex noises in his bedroom.

But much less funny. Which is why I left it out of that show.

The only people who could, I think, raise a valid objection to the material in My Family: Not the Sitcom were my brothers. Neither of them to be honest were that keen on the basic premise. After I emailed Dan (who lives in America) a few months following our mum’s death, to tell him I was thinking about doing a warts-and-all comedy show about our parents – he wrote back, simply: ‘You’re not doing it.’ Ivor, I spoke to in person. He came round to my house and sat down and said: ‘Look, we could talk about this for two hours, and go back and forth on it, but I may as well just ask you upfront: are you going to do this?’ And, without hesitation, I said: ‘Yes.’ Which I guess tells you something about the sliver of ice in the heart of the writer/comedian – or about the Nora Ephron mantra, which means the same thing, that everything is copy – but there is something else. I knew before I had written or performed the show that it would, in its own way, be an act of love. A show that celebrated the warts. Or, more specifically – but I think this is of necessity borne out of love – an act of reclamation. Because, as I’ve said, my mother died abruptly, the lack of time, the lack of dying time, meant there had been no long goodbye, no mobilization of memory. What I was trying to do with My Family: Not the Sitcom, and already had an instinct about before I even started it, was – this sounds creepy, I think, but hey – reincarnate her. To describe her in such detail – and to leave nothing out – that she would truly come alive again on stage. Not truly at all, of course, but in the sense that people use that phrase – to push it as far it could go. And then – obviously I didn’t know this in advance – perform it across the world for two years, thus giving me, with a whole load of people who never met her, the chance to properly say goodbye.

Despite his misgivings, Ivor came to the first night. At the end, for an encore, I came back on stage to do a Q&A. When I announced this to the audience, I saw many people in the crowd, theatre critics, other comedians, various great and good, with their hands up, but I said: ‘Sorry, I’ll answer any questions in a minute but first of all, I need to know what my brother thought. Ivor? What did you think?’ I looked out into the room – the light was blinding and I couldn’t see him, but I heard his voice, which is much like my own, say: ‘I loved it.’ And then he added, ‘I loved it because it felt like she was in the room.’