Scotland

Come Back Home – Summerhall

There is a danger in making theatre intentionally difficult to understand. Make it oblique enough, abstract enough, strip away rhythm, meter, narrative momentum and familiar cultural reference points, and eventually you have to ask whether the audience is being challenged or simply excluded.

Come Back Home walks perilously close to that line.

I found myself thinking about Rothko. Put a Rothko beside conventional paintings and its abstraction, colour and absence of recognisable form acquire context. Fill the entire gallery with Rothkos and something changes. If you anchor the absurd against nothing, it isn’t even quantifiable as absurd.

There is very little here against which to anchor anything.

At its centre is a man telling the story of the boy he once was, growing up amid conflict. His mother, a hydrologist, dies in a car accident on a rainy day when he is nine. Water consequently washes through the piece, literally and metaphorically. “When water meets war, war is amplified”, we are told.

Projected sequences interrupt the live performance. A musician plays the oud, its musical language perhaps unfamiliar to many Western ears. That becomes important. Something can be incomprehensible to us without being meaningless. The same applies to an unfamiliar language or poetry, and perhaps to this production itself.

Much of Come Back Home arrives as torrents of apparently disconnected words. There is surprisingly little theatrical rhythm, despite an essentially linear autobiographical journey. At one point the nine-year-old boy sings Mad World, without intonation and painfully off key. It is not pleasant. It isn’t supposed to be.

And that is the problem, and perhaps the point.

Around me people slump. Some sleep. Creating theatre that is intentionally difficult to watch, lacking in pace or familiarity is a dangerous game, particularly when you remove almost every conventional mechanism by which an audience might find its way inside.

Yet, surprisingly, Come Back Home begins to get there.

Towards the end, the fragments start connecting. There is talk of belonging to a tribe, of being loved, accompanied by little hand gestures suggesting explosions, the price of membership. For a moment I wonder whether the incomprehensibility itself is the subject, whether we are being asked to look across the cultural and psychological distance from which we so easily attempt to understand war, radicalisation and belonging.

“Sometimes it’s fun to think I’m not really who I think I am,” he says, with a smirk.

Perhaps that is the closest Come Back Home comes to providing an answer.

Winner of a Summerhall Meadows Award and playing to a full house, this is certainly not comfortable Fringe entertainment. For much of its running time I wasn’t even sure it was working.

Then, rather inconveniently, it starts to make sense.

Playing until August 31st 2026, https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/2026COMEBAC

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 11th August 2026

North West End UK / Theatre Muse UK Rating: