Home is not just a place. It’s also people and a community.
In a very welcome initiative by Tower Theatre, four short plays by women exploring what the idea of home can mean have each been directed by a woman.
The relationship between parents and children shapes two of the plays. In Melanie Bell’s An IQ Test for My Birthday, directed by Ragan Keefer, four people sit waiting to take an IQ test that would qualify them for membership in Mensa, a society for those scoring in the top two per cent of the population.
The journalist Ed (Fred McMahon), working in an environment of job insecurity, is writing a piece for The Guardian as a result of thinking aloud at work about the declining health of his father, who has dementia. He feels that the task somehow connects him to the parent he is losing. The article gives him a reason for speaking to the others.
The gardening businesswoman Callie (Helen Wieland) explains that she is there because of a birthday voucher from a dad who is convinced she has wasted her intelligence. Rather than be irritated with the judgment behind the gift, she is taking the test. Even in this setting, she is the businesswoman with the network eye who makes sure she swaps business cards with Ed. You can be sure Ed will get a call from Callie.
The most enthusiastic of those taking the test is twelve-and-a-half-year-old Becky (Eloise McCreedy), who hopes the result will be an entry into a summer camp and a group of online gamers. Her mother, Sandra (Lucy Moss), is also taking the test as a way of building her daughter’s confidence. It is a process of bonding that will be more important than the result.
Kate Roche’s play When You Go To Ireland, directed by Simona Hughes, opens with Evelyn’s surprise announcement to her adult children that she wants to be buried in Ireland.
Her son Irvine (Joshua Picton) immediately expresses his objections to the organisational difficulties that would pose and points out she left Ireland at the age of ten and doesn't even have an Irish accent. But for Evelyn (Rosanna Preston), Ireland is home.
A little later, just before leaving, he privately councils his sister Tessa (Kate Pemberton) to just agree with their mother, and later they can ignore her wishes.
The most hopeful of the four plays is Difficult to Describe, Understand or Measure by Sibila Diaz-Plaja, which charts what we initially believe is the end of a relationship.
Jo is packing boxes for her departure to America to take up an art post. It’s not just many of her belongings she is leaving behind. Convinced that a long-distance relationship with her partner Tom wouldn't work, she has ended it. However, the old books she puts into piles and a dress she wore when first meeting Tom stir up feelings for Tom, who is hanging about trying to be helpful, even offering her a lift to the airport.
The sensitive direction of Faith Martin Abongo helps Rebecca Allan as Jo and Nick Edwards as Tom impressively convey the changing emotional ambiguities of the breakup.
In stark contrast to the upbeat ending to that piece, Janet South’s dystopian play, Homemakers, directed by Feiyang Yang takes us to the nightmare world of the modern neo-liberal economy where homes are difficult to obtain and too easily lost as workers are brutally exploited.
Karola (Sophia Crisafis) and the new employee Devan are working long shifts at a production line constructing dolls' houses. Neither of them can afford a place they would like to live. This is despite Karola working a nine-hour day shift followed by a nine-hour night shift and grabbing a few hours of sleep under the work table between shifts.
Even the productivity bonus she earns doesn't enable her to afford more than a one-bedroom flat, which means her daughter can’t live with her. Meanwhile, the work is affecting her health, including causing severe pains in her right hand.
Things seem worse for new employee Devan (Thisakya Dias), who has to sleep in a dormitory with five others. However, she explores other ways of changing her situation. She briefly asks about the union and later follows up on an idea for herself that she hears from Karola.
Anyone imagining this story is far-fetched should look at advertisements for flat shares. Among the ones I noticed in London was a room occupied by three lads looking for a fourth and a room that had space for little more than a bed, which a young woman was willing to share with another person.
Yet every year, the productivity of workers increases. You might wonder where the results of that productivity go.