The Opera House stage is a black void punctuated across the top with a line of golden lights pointing in all directions, including at us. When Geoff Sobelle enters from the audience and starts pottering about, two more floor floods shine out at us. The message, I now realise, is that we are part of this show, Home; that ‘home’ is part of all our lives. 

But when he drags on a triptych wooden frame, finds some plastic sheeting and starts to methodically staple the latter to the former, my heart sinks. Is this now a thing with New York-based epic theatre, that you bore your audience initially so that whatever follows seems great by comparison (cf: THE SELECT: The Sun Also Rises)? When someone coughs, he shoots a quick look at us and everyone laughs. Are we really that easily pleased?

Happily my initial trepidation is short-lived. The translucent screen becomes a device for creating the first of a series of transformative illusions. Not that magical illusion is the main feature. It’s a way of recalibrating our brains to see the visual ‘reality’ that unfolds over the next 100 minutes or so as ‘non-naturalistic’; as the random memories that might pass through the consciousness of a house, as it recalls what made it a home for various people over some years.

As the two-storey house is constructed and furnished, it is the everyday actions of its inhabitants that draw us in, compelling us to interpret relationships, and the thoughts and feelings associated with what they are doing; the stories within the storeys. Putting a kettle on the stove, sleeping, dressing, working, watching TV, preparing food, eating, drinking; doing dishes, laundry and a bit of house cleaning; arriving, putting up pictures, departing … Such recognisable activities define the house as a home and we can all relate to some of them at least, regardless of our age or domestic status.

While all of us use a bathroom every day we don’t often see those actions on stage but there it is, upstairs, upstage centre: basin, mirror, lavatory, shower-curtained bath … The traffic escalates as all the inhabitants over time go about their ablutions simultaneously without ever seeing each other – except when they do, in the odd meta-theatrical moment that reminds us we’re watching actors at work.

A scan of the biographies in the programme reveal the creator/ performers – Geoff Sobelle, Sophie Bortolussi, Jennifer Kidwell, Justin Rose and Ching Valdes-Aran – are multi-skilled, as is our own Sam Glenn, a year six student from Eastbourne’s Muritai School, making his professional debut.

Singer/musician Elvis Perkins haunts the environs with his soulful music, adding hints of story to the action. Designers Steven Dufala (scenic design), Christopher Kuhl (lighting), Brandon Wolcott (sound), Karen Young (costumes) and Steve Cuiffo (illusion) all play their parts, too, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, to manifest this simultaneously extraordinary yet prosaic experience. (See the full team list here.)

Just when we might begin to think the idea could have run its course, a house-warming party starts to evolve – for which young Sam plucks the Host from the audience. As more and more people arrive from among us, bearing bottles and gifts, multiple new story-threads emerge and interweave to enrich the theme and stimulate our imaginations.

For those who don’t make it to the onstage party, festive lights embrace us all. A friendly neighbourhood brass band (not credited in the programme) adds to the festive mood. There are costumes – penguins, Santa Claus, just-capped Graduates, the Grim Reaper … Indeed birth, death and most things in between get ‘mentions’ in this extraordinary all-encompassing visual essay.

Two audience members – one in the study, the other at the dining table – describe their own homes, speaking simultaneously into microphones, so we just hear snippets … As the last guests depart and the winds of change blow through, a poignant mood emerges that gives each of us space to contemplate the show’s central question: what makes a house a home?

As for what makes a Festival show worth going to, Home is up there with the best.

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