Shoe Shop, Stornoway, 23 February 2006

Stornoway's production of Home. © Ian Stephen

MODELS ARE a very serious form of play. A change of scale can lend the perspective needed for understanding. So model yachts in test-tanks result in Americas Cup winners. And Stewart Laing’s production for ‘Home’ assembled a team of designers, a local model-maker and a local artist, each assigned to making a room for a single doll’s house. The tiny building was to occupy a redundant shoe-shop.

It was open-shop as the rooms took shape so the promenade through a theatre set was already working before the scheduled performances took place. It was as if Western Isles Hospital had linked with the shop’s near neighbours, Western Isles Police, and opened an invitation to the Council’s Archaeologist. Detailed scenes were built on trestle tables and the workplace buzzed with the zip of the scalpel blade and the whirr of digital equipment, a contemporary tick of the clock.

When it came to the performance we were indeed led back and forth in time, in intimate groups. Lighting and music was expertly arranged to be unobtrusive as the model-makers led you through, referring to their clipboard notes. If we didn’t go from the cradle to the grave we did progress from the basement to the attic.

Okay, Stornoway houses don’t have cellars but you realised pretty quickly that the scenes within the walls were not contained by the laws of physics or any other known conventions.

So exquisite details in the various rooms represented peat-preserved axeheads or the contemporary debris of a possible murder scene. The single beam of a pencil torch could take you through the miraculous harmony of decaying arrangements within an abandoned house. You joined its maker, Moira Maclean, in an act of burglary. But you became a voyeur rather than a thief.

A history of décor was hinted at in the attic – again the external objects which give hints as to the tastes and obsessions that occupied a particular brain, now living or dead. You moved from the Hebridean Ideal Home (birchwood panelling and a cast iron stove made from an abandoned steel buoy) to the challenging normality of Laing’s own bathroom in a Glasgow flat.

You longed for security as the dream landscape in a child’s bedroom flashed by you in projection and sound-sculpture. And you turned round to see that all the disparate rooms had indeed fitted into a single complete unit.

The device worked perfectly as a container for all these tangents on the theme of home. But really it was more of a house, though one manufactured by virtuosos of their crafts.
The low-key ambience of the performance suited the design fine. The dramaturgy by Pamela Carter arranges and presents the analysis. This is a new form of theatre for me, and one I’d like to experience again. But it lacked the driving vision which would edit and arrange but still allow the disparate details to fall together into their own form.

Home is an emotional word but there were only faint glimpses of emotion in this engaging work of exploration.

© Ian Stephen, 2006