WE all have cousins we’d sooner swimmer across the Clyde naked – in winter – to avoid than acknowledge them in the street.
Somehow, genetics don’t come into it. We may be connected by DNA and ancestry but not by experience, values and sensibility.
But what happens if by circumstance we have to make contact with these people? What if we have to allow them to encroach into our lives, for whatever reason, perhaps a family funeral?
Ann Marie Di Mambro’s new play Rachel’s Cousins explores this theme. It features Rachel, a professional, successful woman who also happens to be something of a snob.
Rachel wants nothing to do with her mother’s side of the family whom she thinks of as a reckless bunch of benefit cheats. But when she discovers she has the BRACCA2 gene, which means an increased risk of breast cancer, she feels duty bound to let her cousins know and advise them to get tested.
And when this happens the cousins begin to take a wrecking ball to her life. Hope does Rachel cope? Is her life in any way to be enhanced by the arrival of the section of the family she’d rather didn’t exist at all?
Rachel’s Cousins, which also stars Richard Conlon, Julie Coombe, Isabelle Joss and Shonagh Price
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