Homesick is a story about a mother and daughter, success, and the friction generated when the past, present, and future come together.
Sam (Eliza Scott) has come back home to her rural town of Wallerawang to live with her mum, Rachel (Deborah Galanos), after a hasty and unexplained departure from music school in New York. In Sam’s absence, her doddery grandma, Eadie (Annie Byron), has moved into the family home. Womanhood and motherhood is at the forefront of the action as three generations of women get in each others’ hair, Sam dealing with the competition between her mother’s expectations and her own. Jess (Alex Stylianou), Sam’s ex-boyfriend, is the only person that Sam feels she can talk to, but this brings its own complications.
Homesick is produced by Bontom and is part of Old 505’s FreshWorksFEMME program, a program that promotes new work by women. Sally Alrich-Smythe’s script thrums with heart, dropping allegory and polemics. It is a story about love and cruelty between women that love each other yet struggle to be who they think they want to be.
Claudia Osborne shows her directorial dexterity as she draws out the script’s tension between heartfelt nostalgia and high stakes personal anxiety. The action is split between the living room stage-right and bedroom stage-left, but takes on an extra dimension with some of the most innovative and considered video accompaniment that Sydney theatre has seen. The motif of the home videos Sam finds in a box of old VHS tapes moulds together the present and the past. A recorded sequence in the style of an Instagram story brings to life a party offstage, that is as surprisingly familiar as it is impactful. The video accompaniment from Luca Barone-Peters and Suzie Henderson was essential and not peripheral to the show’s coherency.
The performers are of a rare quality. Eliza Scott as Sam personifies the anxious difficulty of her situation, huddled in her beanie, wrapped up in her doona. As Rachel, Deborah Galanos takes us with her as a mother’s love and ambition for her daughter becomes wrapped up in guilt and defensiveness and real hurt. The final conversation between Galanos and Scott plays our heartstrings like a melancholy harpist. Byron as Eadie must make everyone see something of their grandma, well-meaning but without a filter and ignored as much as she is so sincerely needed. Stylianou’s Jess balances the women’s tension with boyish bullheadedness. His stage sense is natural, something that can’t be taught, and his flair makes the deep and difficult family tensions always palatable for the audience.
Homesick is unmissable.
