Various venues, 23-26 February 2006

Abseilers scaling down the outside of a block of flats for Glasgow's production of HOME.

ONE OF the pleasant spin-offs of being a theatre critic is you end up as a bit of a social anthropologist. Travelling round, you get to see not only the performances on stage, but also the audiences they attract. In class, age, outlook and sensibility, every theatre engages with a different group of people and it’s fascinating to observe how they differ.

Never has this been more the case than with the National Theatre of Scotland’s inaugural ‘Home’ project. By designing performances for very particular, non-theatre spaces and responding to the idea of “home”, the ten directors created a set of productions that were inextricably rooted in the places where they happened.

Whether it was a doll’s house in Stornoway mirroring the abandoned buildings of Lewis, or the Northlink Ferry in Lerwick echoing the experience of generations in transit, every one of the performances was an expression of local identity.

For this reason, even the least successful of the five performances I saw had a sense of purpose, a feeling of value, borne out of a real relationship with the community.

This manifested itself in different ways – in Edinburgh, it was school children writing the script; in Dundee it was care home residents sharing their memories on video; in Glasgow it was local kids playing a part in the action; and in Aberdeen it was amateur actors performing alongside professionals. In each case, the subtextual message made it clear whose nation this National Theatre belonged to.

The most high-profile and, in many ways, the most ambitious of the ten shows was also the most disappointing. Directed by John Tiffany in the Cranhill area of the city, ‘Home Glasgow’ sounded great on paper: we would watch three abseilers scaling down the outside of a block of flats, stopping at various windows along the way and filming what they saw inside.

They would keep track of ‘Lord of the Rings’ star Billy Boyd as he raced around the building, trying to sort things out with his brother, girlfriend, granny and mother. The film would be projected onto the side of a van at ground level for those of us standing outside to see.

Initially it promised to be striking piece of theatre. The abseilers brought a gripping sense of danger which was enhanced by Boyd’s dramatic arrival in a speeding car. The technical novelty of the idea wore off, however, as soon as Boyd entered the building and you realised you were watching a jumped-up soap opera on an outsize television screen in the freezing cold.

The problem wasn’t so much the throw-away nature of Davey Anderson’s script, a light-hearted surveillance thriller, as the performance’s lack of theatricality. The knowledge that the actors were hot-footing it from flat to flat wasn’t interesting enough to subvert the filmic nature of the experience. It was only in the final moments, a self-consciously silly fight sequence between an army of local children and the MI5 officers, that a sense of theatre returned.

‘Home Dundee’ stalled in a similar way. Director Kenny Miller took over the main entrance hall of the McManus Galleries and kitted it out as an old-time ballroom, albeit one filtered through his distinctively camp sensibility. The audience sat at long tables beneath a forest of black balloons, while mirror balls flickered and black-clad characters prowled around like something out of a Berlin cabaret.

The scene was set for an extravagant performance, but the substance of the show – a video screening of old folk reminiscing about their courting days – was fundamentally untheatrical. The interviews were entertaining in themselves, but anything Miller added – including the talents of three actors whom I know to be excellent – was merely decorative. It was a short, amiable event, but one that lacked punch.

Perhaps by being less ambitious, Anthony Neilson’s ‘Home Edinburgh’ was more satisfying. His idea was a simple one: get a group of primary school children to dream up a first minister’s Question Time and bring in a group of professional actors to perform their script.

The result was funny and whimsical, reflecting the children’s genuine concerns about the environment and junk food one minute, and their fanciful obsessions with cartoons and scary movies the next. As Neilson said, it was surreal more than satirical, but it had a playful sense of what theatre could be.

Most satisfying of these four, then, was ‘Home Aberdeen’, in which director Alison Peebles lovingly breathed new life into a derelict block of flats, animating a series of rooms with tales of the old folk, teenagers, fishermen and oil rig workers who might have lived there. It looked good, sounded better and embraced more than any the sense of community and of life lived in that place. This Home is where the art was.

© Mark Fisher, 2006