DramaLondonReview

Home, Sweet Home – Bitesize Festival, Riverside Studios, London

Reviewer: Richard Maguire

Writer: Amalia Kontesi

Director: Penny Gkritzapi

Amalia Kontesi’s play takes some time to get going. The first half tells the story of Ellie returning to her childhood Greece and remembering lazy summer days by the beach, two hours outside of Athens. She was just a body in the sun, she says. It’s not until the end of the 55 minutes that Home, Sweet Home reveals a startling tragedy.

It’s a shame that the catastrophe is not signalled earlier in the play as Ellie’s memories of her house by the sea verge on the mundane. There is ice cream and new friends and football on the sand with her elder brother. We hear of her father’s plan to buy a house on the coast, somewhere the family can visit every summer. Even when Ellie is older, now working in advertising in London, she goes back for the summer, ever more frequently as she begins to earn more money.

The play begins with Ellie in the present day cleaning up the house to put on the market, but we don’t know why she intends to sell it; however, this mystery isn’t enough to rouse the interest of the audience. Also, at the start, the play is unnecessarily sentimental with Ellie’s monologue directed at the photograph of her mother as she is reminded of the holidays they spent in the house.

Of course, by the end of Home, Sweet Home this sentimentality makes sense, but most of the running time is given to these idyllic memories with the result that there is no driving narrative to encourage the audience to wonder why Ellie is selling the house she loves so much. And neither is the disaster visible in Isidora Provatos’s performance as the Greek woman whose chipper optimism belies what has already happened. Provatos gives a natural performance, but too often her character is enrapt by nostalgia.

Occasionally, Ellie converses with her family who appear on an old TV in the house but there are some issues with sound as these recordings are played at a deafening level, likewise the music that accompanies the news footage presented later. However, the clips from the news finally show what’s at stake but they come too late in this iteration.

Runs until 14 July 2024

Bitesize Festival runs until 28 July 2024

The Reviews Hub Score

Nostalgic

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The Reviews Hub London is under the editorship of Richard Maguire. The Reviews Hub was set up in 2007. Our mission is to provide the most in-depth, nationwide arts coverage online.

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