Home david storey

artist note: Brenda roBinsHome n. [ hohm ]: • The place of one’s dwelling and nurturing, with its associations • A place where one’s affections centre, or where one finds rest, refuge or satisfaction

If I hadn’t become an actor I would have liked to have been a forensic scientist. Happily there are times when the two professions intersect.

Home might seem simple enough. As far as action goes, not a lot happens. This is when an actor’s exploratory work can get interesting. We have to search the text extra-carefully for hidden clues. Answers can be found in something as obscure as the placement of a semi-colon or the… at the end of a line. It can be quite painstaking work but very satisfying for a wannabe CSI agent.

In a play such as this where the plot is, let’s say, nonexistent, where do you look? As with a Beckett play or an episode of Seinfeld, the heart of the piece lies in the relationships between characters. After all the textual nitpicking, you have to hope that you are working with a group of people with whom you can develop rich and convincing connections. Here the work gets a lot easier. Andre is a new acquaintance. The others in the cast and Albert, our director, I have known for at least 20 years. Not only that, but they are my friends and I like them. In fact I would go so far as to say they are like family to me and this company where we work is a little like a second home. Home. The case rests here.

I found another definition of home that I like: Accessible to visitors. A formula inviting company

I hope that we are successful in revealing this version of Home to you. Welcome to it.

Brenda Robins, Kathleen in Home

a message from tHe artistic directorI have been thinking a great deal lately about the notion of home.

When I was a child I was very lucky to have a place where many families came together to share their summers. This place became not only the landscape of my childhood but the foundation of my aspirations. This place had been in my family for several generations (since my family’s arrival in this country) and was, more than anywhere in the world, the place where I felt I belonged. It was also a place where hundreds of others felt welcome and at home. Such was the magic of that place.

Ten years before we started Soulpepper my parent’s generation decided to get rid of that place and I lost my sense of home. Only recently it occurred to me that all of the effort and passion that I have put into Soulpepper and the Young Centre are an attempt to recreate a place where I belong and where many others – including you – can feel at home. To have a family is a blessing and to have a second family is a great, great gift.

The play that you will see tonight is about, among other things, what happens to us in the absence of family. For that reason it breaks my heart. I am glad that it also, in the hands of my good friends, makes me laugh until I have trouble breathing.

Like Brenda Robins, I am extremely blessed to have this second family and it is my profound hope that you will find, tonight and always, a home here. Welcome.

Albert Schultz, Artistic Director

Home england 1970

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production sponsor

Approximate running time 1 hour and 20 minutes. There will be no intermission.

Home is presented by special arrangement with Samuel French, Inc. The audio and/or video recording of this performance by any means whatsoever is strictly prohibited.

production

Albert Schultzdirector

Ken MacKenzieset & costume designer

Lorenzo Savoinilighting designer

John Gzowskisound designer

Nancy Drydenproduciton stage manager

Janet Gregorassistant stage manager

Darragh Parsonsrehearsal stage manager

Ashlyn Irelandrehearsal assistant stage manager

Diane Pitbladodialect coach

Kelly McEvenuealexander coach

Anja Zeljkovicassistant director

cast

Oliver Dennisjack

Michael Hanrahanharry

Brenda Robinskathleen

Andre Sillsalfred

Maria Vacratsismarjorie

Background Notes by Associate Artist Paula Wing.

Background notes“Art is my life whether you like it or not.” This pugnacious sentence from his novel A Serious Man is a good introduction to David Storey. Born working class in the north of England, Storey financed his highbrow art school studies by playing the blue collar sport of professional rugby. What he wrote came from his own obsessions and preoccupations: the weight of family and the call to freedom, class rules and gender conflicts, mental anguish and instability. His work distinguishes him as one of the only writers in his native land to have won awards as both novelist and playwright.

He began writing on the long train rides to and from his rugby matches. Feeling like an outsider in both the art and sporting worlds, he was only happy on the train, he later said. Success came first in fiction, with novels that mirrored the growing pains of the post-war generation. Alienated from their roots and their families by higher education and greater opportunity, his conflicted characters could sometimes escape the narrow confines of small town life, but never its stinging legacy. His first published novel, This Sporting Life, inspired by his rugby days, made his name and is still widely admired.

His plays share themes with his fiction but are more focused on emotions: rage, passion, barely suppressed violence, despair. The best of his plays – like Home – are beautifully shaped and instinctively theatrical. Storey himself had only seen a handful of plays when he began writing them but he proved to be something of a savant. Literally. “The only plays that have ever worked,” he says, “are when I start with the first line… and they write themselves.” He claims it never took him more than two or three days to write a full-length play.

Storey’s best plays are ensemble pieces with rich, nuanced roles for actors. Part of what made Home such a hit when it premiered was that it showcased two great stars of the old school, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson. The two titans were originally baffled by the play. They found its terse exchanges bizarre, they were stymied by its silences and confused by its frequent non-sequiturs. Still, they gradually came to trust Storey and director Lindsay Anderson and the resulting production was a triumph of each man’s later career.

As it did with Gielgud and Richardson, this play creeps up on you. Part of the spell it casts is the slow reveal of the where and the how of these characters. It may have been tossed off in a weekend but Home is a penetrating examination of the world Storey perceived around him, and forty years later its tensions and passions still resonate. As director Dominic Dromgoole said, “if posterity is true, it should reveal a giant in David Storey.”

biographyDavid Storey was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire in 1933. A prolific writer with some 15 plays, 12 novels and one book of poetry to his name, Storey’s body of work includes The Contractor (1969), The Changing Room (1972), each of which won the New York Critics Best Play of the Year Award, as well as In Celebration (1969), which was adapted as a film in 1974. Storey’s first novel, This Sporting Life (1960), won the Macmillan Fiction Award. His 1970 play Home won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play and was nominated for a Tony Award. Storey currently lives in London with his wife and four children.

soulpepper production

young centre for tHe performing arts distillery Historic district

Jacqueline Robertson-Cullhead of hair & makeup

Janet Pym wardrobe coordinator

Geoff Hughes cutter

Natalie Swierz dresser

Mike Keayscarpenter

Barbara Nowakowski1st hand

Greg Chambers props builder

Duncan Johnstonehead scenic artist

Daniela Mazicscenic artist

Paul Boddumpainter

Soulpepper Theatre Company is an active member of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (pact), the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts (tapa) and Theatre Ontario, and engages, under the terms of the Canadian Theatre Agreement, professional artists who are members of Canadian Actors’ Equity Association. Scenic Artists and Set Decorators employed by Soulpepper Theatre Company are represented by Local 828 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.

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