If you come home to find a play being staged in every room of your house, don't panic - it's probably homemade, writes Belinda McKeon
This could be your washing machine, this seat that a pale-faced girl has made for herself as she listens to her walkman and silently cries to herself; it could be your kitchen sink in which she rests her feet, snug in their brightly striped socks. It could be your fridge that this girl ends up having a conversation with as she waits for her dinner date to arrive, your jar of pesto that she scrutinises, your bottle of milk that causes her to twitch up her nose. And it could be your door she answers to that dinner date, and your kitchen table they sit at, peering at one another in uncertainty, and your living-room and your bedroom that they move around as they delve into the secret loss that binds them so tightly together . . . all of this could be happening in your house.
Except, instead, it's happening in the house of Jack Lynch. Or rather, the house that once belonged to one of Cork's most famous sons, high up in the city's Shandon district. And the house, with its narrow walls, sighing pipes and creaking floorboards, welcomes this strange behaviour. Perhaps it's that such antics seem familiar - if not from the days of the former Taoiseach, then at least from the more recent use of the house as a residence for artists. Or perhaps it's that theatre works best in a space that is lived in, slept in, imbued with decades of stories.
For theatre this is: the first performance of homemade, the new production from the acclaimed English company Signal to Noise and its artistic director Chris Good, who created the now-legendary Dial-a-Tempest at the 2000 Edinburgh Fringe. Like Dial-a-Tempest, homemade comes to life not on a conventional stage but in the homes of people who ask to stage it; in individual rooms, surrounded by the stuff and detritus of individual lives. This first performance, in the Jack Lynch house, has been organised to showcase the production to the press before it begins its five-day run in private houses as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival; the run, at €50 a performance, has been booked out for weeks. Groups of between four and ten people will watch as the young company - actors Lucy Ellinson, Sebastien Lawson and Jamie Wood, along with Goode - trace a funny and deeply moving path across carpets and corridors new to them, but intimately known to their hosts. And although it's not the first time in Ireland that a company has crossed the thresholds of private houses to make a piece of work (Daghdha Dance Company, for example, brought musicians and dancers into people's homes with its Living Room project in 2002), homemade goes one step further in that it recreates itself anew, through improvisation and the use of objects, across several rooms of every domestic space in which it finds itself. As the performers move, the audience follows, looks into the cupboards and drawers they open, spies on the pages of books they leaf through, picks at the food they cook (okay, maybe that was just me).
THE CORE OF the story - a young woman coping with tragedy, and with the struggle to begin again - remains the same, but its sketching changes in every space. "It's really about going into a home and bewitching it," says Goode. Audiences in Nottinghamshire, where the show was first devised as part of a larger project in the Harley Gallery, have certainly been bewitched.
The shows have also been diverse. For one show, Goode and the actors discovered that they were the birthday gift for a 15-year-old boy and a houseful of his friends. "We thought we were going to be torn limb from limb," he laughs. "But it was fine. And our youngest audience member was a nine-year-old, wide-eyed all the way through. I think it's a show that deals with quite sort of adult ideas, but there's something . . . I mean, I hate using words like magic. But I think there's just something about the intimacy and proximity of the experience that I think just immerses anybody, and so everybody can find something to latch on to."
Audiences, he admits, have sometimes found the tragic undertones of the piece difficult to take within the confines of spaces in which they might have themselves experienced tragedy or loss. "But I think that the arc of the piece is very optimistic. And it immediately takes you from that deep sadness into a very affirmative place, hopefully even for people who have had very direct experience of those sorts of situations."
Not that the experience of going into people's houses has always gone entirely smoothly for Goode and his crew.
"I think it's fair to say," he grins, "that we've had a couple of experiences where we've gone in and there's already been a sort of play going on, just in terms of the people who are there. There are certain tensions . . . and we've had to deal with a lot of hostess anxiety. A lot of 'don't burn our pans' and that kind of thing, yeah."
But homemade, ultimately, is not about pots and pans. "It's more about people," says Goode. "That's the thesis, really. That homes are made out of people, not things. Not knick-knacks."