Home ****

The Shed, National Theatre

EXCERPT: “When these kind of socially critical and important pieces are created, there is a sort of universal reluctance to critique anything about them.”

London Road, a superb musical created entirely by replicating the cadences of real interviewees’ responses to the murder of five prostitutes in Ipswich in 2008, had a detrimental impact on my appreciation of Home. Without the same tightness, precision and superb choreography of its National Theatre predecessor, Home is, however, a remarkable achievement. It should be judged on its own merits, not London Road’s, and its almost incomparable small budget should be born in mind.

Home is a project that has been driven forward by director and creator Nadia Fall. She interviewed the inhabitants of a London based hostel that provides two years of shelter to people who would otherwise be homeless, and seeks to get them back on their feet. The characters and stories she encountered make up the script and plot line of the piece. Like London Road, the actors swap in and out of personas, but impersonate the various interviewees with precision, mirroring exact ways of speaking. There is a real focus on music in Home too: sound designer Mike Walker and music man Tom Green have worked together to create an original score that supports and informs the development of people’s stories. Grace Savage’s supreme beat boxing skills are put to full use: her character’s lines are replaced entirely by a beat boxing language. In the Q&A session afterwards, Nadia Fall explains that this interpretation was also an attempt to represent all those hundreds of hostel inhabitants who wouldn’t be interviewed, and who hadn’t been given a voice by the piece.

When these kind of socially critical and important pieces are created, there is a sort of universal reluctance to critique anything about them. However, I did feel that the piece could have done with a bit more rigorous cutting, and that more attention could have been paid to tightening up its dramatic structure. Despite these slight issues, the piece was impressively adept at passing on its key messages: firstly, how burdened by disadvantages these young people were; secondly, the very strong sense that they are all being incredibly resilient and are proactively striving to get themselves on the upward trajectory; and, thirdly, how crucial such organisations are, and how extraordinary its staff are. The acting is also superb, with Ashley McGuire as the hostel manager (perennially off for a smoke) and Michaela Coel (as the pregnant girl, among other characters) giving especially impressive star turns. This all sounds rather too good to be true, especially when the form of the piece makes it wonderfully accessible, and when the low budget set design means that on a practical note there’s a very real chance the production could have a longer shelf life than its brief stint at The Shed. (Whilst I’m on the subject of the set, it must be noted that designer Ruth Sutcliffe has done wonderful things with limited resources, making the corridor entrance into the theatre space work as the hostel’s office space, in which we can see various people commune whilst the action is happening out at the front). It was also very touching to hear (in the post show Q&A) that earlier that same day the young interviewees from the hostel came along to see the production, and were immensely grateful and touched by the fact their stories had been given a voice.