Tag: Come Back Home

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...