Kit Green’s:
The Home
Role: Lead Producer, on behalf of the Albany, Entelechy Arts and Christopher (Kit) Green.
The Home, a fictional residential care home project, was created by multi award-winning artist Kit Green and had a number of iterations, all of which I produced or co-produced.
“You’re going to stay in The Home. Just for a few days. It’s a chance for you to be really looked after, and to give everyone else a break. It’s a great place. Rated excellent by the Care Quality Commission – best in its price range. Lots to do! Or you can keep yourself to yourself. You’ll love it. It’s not forever. Promise.”
The live show, a 48-hour immersive experience, gave participants an opportunity to discover the problems and pleasures of being cared for, and explored the care home as a place of reinvention and possibility. The innovative new work saw 30 people coming to stay in a theatrical care home for an entire weekend. The performance was customised to each audience member: you’d get your own room, meal plan, treatment regime, entertainment and wellbeing programme, plus dedicated key-workers who provide your care.
The Home featured a large and diverse cast including professional actors, non-professional elder performers, and a support team of experts, activists, academics and communicators in the field of ageing and residential care.
The Home premiered in 2019 at London’s Age Against the Machine Festival, and then toured to Stockton-on-Tees with ARC Stockton.
The show was due to begin an international tour in Spring 2021, starting with Tokyo in association with Saitama Arts Theater, however plans had to be altered due to Covid-19. We instead created a large-scale digital collaboration between the UK and Japan - part game, part choose-your-own-adventure, part film, part theatre performance - funded by The Japan Foundation. Explore The Digital Home here.
In June 2021 we developed a third iteration of The Home, funded by Arts Council England, called The Home Roadshow. During the R&D stage this toured care homes in London and Sheffield, and will tour more widely soon.
Photos credit: Sorcha Bridge Photography
“This extraordinary immersive experiment investigating the performance of – and line between – care and control is an unforgettable feat of emotional engineering. Slice the show open and you’d see the layers of performance like rings in a tree, so tightly wound, you quickly lose count…
Logistically, The Home is remarkable: the level of control even when we thought we had agency; the intricacy of planning and stage management; the intense periods of improvisation from all cast and crew. It rings us out emotionally, too. The Home is neither a blanket celebration nor critique of the care sector, but a demonstration of how complicated and difficult it is. By making us genuinely vulnerable, The Home forces us to directly address the care industry and our own possible futures within it.”
— The Guardian
“Audacious and confrontational…Powerfully felt and a compelling call to arms…Impeccably researched and minutely detailed in its delivery, it was impossible to resist The Home”
— British Theatre Guide
