Performer Name: Open Sky Theatre

Show Description

Uma Taylor, is a healthy, curious and rowdy seven-year-old living in 1950s London with her working-class parents Ronnie and Shaheen and her brothers Raj and Eric. An examination at a local child welfare clinic sees Uma sent to a children’s convalescence home in the country for an indeterminate period of time. Promised fresh air, good food and exercise she instead encounters the formidable Matron, racist staff and peers and crushing indifference to her loneliness. Uma, with her defiant wit and boundless energy tries to stand up to everything and everyone she encounters. Will Uma, and her trusty bear Bess, ever find their way home? THE HOME offers a virtuoso solo performance with lead actor Genevieve Sabherwal playing ten characters and voices. It combines physical theatre, shadow puppetry, object manipulation, an interactive set, dynamic lighting from a self-contained rig, sound design and songs that are both recorded and sung, including an original recording of the writer’s father singing in a working class pub in the 1950s! Uma’s determined, and often comedic, resistance to the fragmentation of family, institutional oppression and racism is funny and deeply moving. The personal odyssey of this tiny defiant figure makes audiences laugh and cry. The politics of the story are seen in the media daily and remain as relevant today and they were seventy years ago. Audience Quotes ‘A magical performance with such light and dark, technically deft, brilliant.’ ‘Visceral, emotional and powerful. Poses questions about our collective British history.’ ‘There cannot be many companies that could make something so beautiful about such harrowing subject matter.’ The show appeals to audiences interested in new writing and visual theatre, South Asian diaspora communities, people with experience of institutional care or family separation, and anyone who has felt lost and alone.