Home
From 9 November 1998
To 14 November 1998
Author - David Storey
"so rare, and these days, to need someone to whom one can really talk. ""I know what you mean."
"One works. On looks around. One meets people. But very little communication actually takes place."
David Storey's play home asks more questions than it answers. From a successful contemporary novelist we would expect a compelling story. But in this, as in all his plays, we are simply presented with a slice of 5 'real' lives. Figures meets on a terrace. They make conversation. They laugh. They cry. They go on their way again. We overhear their present and glimpse their past rather than have them presented to us and in a neat theatrical package.
So what are we to make of these people and the home they inhabit? Storey challenges us to piece together our own play. As his characters try to communicate with each other we reach our own conclusions about their history, their tragedy and their comedy.
It is possible to interpret the playwright's intentions in a number of ways. Issues of institutional care, mental illness, even end-of-empire nostalgia offer themselves as hidden themes.
But above all, the play presents a version of a story we are all living out in our daily lives as we meet and interact with other people. We talk. We struggle to understand each other. We reveal different aspects of ourselves in what we have done and what we hope to do. We try to build new relationships and to salvage old ones. Always we are trying to communicate.
Home was first presented by the English stage Company on June 17th 1970.