The Albany, Entelechy Arts and Christopher Green, in association with ARC Stockton, Future Arts Centres and Saitama Arts Theatre Present
The Home
By Christopher Green
A 48-hour immersive experience where you sleep, eat and thrill to the experience of The Home.
“You’re going to stay in The Home. Just for a few days. It’s a chance for you to be really looked after, and to give everyone else a break. It’s a great place. Rated excellent by the Care Quality Commission – best in its price range. Lots to do! Or you can keep yourself to yourself. You’ll love it. It’s not forever. Promise.”
Enter the world of a fictional residential care home in this large-scale experimental show by Christopher Green. The Home is a 48-hour immersive experience which gives participants an opportunity to discover the problems and pleasures of being cared for in a communal setting, and explores the care home as a place of reinvention and possibility.
This innovative new work sees 30 people coming to stay in a theatrical care home for an entire weekend. The performance is customised to you: you have your own room, meal plan, treatment regime, entertainment and wellbeing programme, plus dedicated key-workers who provide your care.
The Home is created by multi award-winning artist Christopher Green and features a large and diverse cast. This is made up of elder participants who are emerging as performers, highly-skilled professional actors of all ages and a support team of experts, activists and communicators in the field of ageing and residential care.
This work has grown out of Green’s long-established practice of blurring the lines between theatre and audience, between constructed narrative and reality, which has featured in his work commissioned by a host of cultural institutions including Southbank Centre, Tates Modern and Britain, V&A, The Guggenheim New York, and The British Library.
The Home was staged twice in the UK in Autumn 2019. Here’s what the press had to say about it….
The Guardian: This extraordinary immersive experiment investigating the performance of – and line between – care and control is an unforgettable feat of emotional engineering.
Slice the show open and you’d see the layers of performance like rings in a tree, so tightly wound, you quickly lose count…
Logistically, The Home is remarkable: the level of control even when we thought we had agency; the intricacy of planning and stage management; the intense periods of improvisation from all cast and crew. It rings us out emotionally, too. The Home is neither a blanket celebration nor critique of the care sector, but a demonstration of how complicated and difficult it is. By making us genuinely vulnerable, The Home forces us to directly address the care industry and our own possible futures within it.
British Theatre Guide: “Audacious and confrontational…Powerfully felt and a compelling call to arms…Impeccably researched and minutely detailed in its delivery, it was impossible to resist The Home”
The Home will be on tour in the UK in early 2021 and the Japanese version launching in summer 2021.