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HOME (2005)
by David Storey
Directed by Scott Alan Evans
March 12 to 14, 2005
Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street, NYC
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| SYNOPSIS |
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A conversation in a park among respectable middle-class Brits leads to startling revelations in this enigmatic masterpiece. Winner of the 1970 New York Critics and the 1971 London Evening Standard Awards for Best Play of the Year. |
| CAST/CREW |
Yin-Hsuan Chen
Violincello
Jennifer Noterman
Production Stage Manager
Mary Louise Geiger
Lighting Designer
Carol Rosegg Production Photographer |
| PRESS |
Wolf Entertainment Guide
Of all The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) readings I have attended, ?Home? is the most moving. David... [ read more]
The New York Times
In a sublime script-in-hand staging, the Actors Company Theater is making an excellent case for a... [ read more]
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| DRAMATURGY |
Most Recent performance: England?s York Theatre Royal, Oct. 27-30 2004
NY Premiere: Morosco Theatre, Nov.17, 1970-Feb.20-1971 (110 performances)
The last Broadway revival was: NONE (34 years since last major production in NYC)
Novelist, poet, and playwright David Storey was born on 13 July 1933 in Wakefield, Yorkshire, the third son of a coal miner. His father was a miner who spent 40 years at the coalface, driven by a dream of propelling his three sons into the world of higher education. Mr. Shaw, the father in Storey?s play In Celebration (1969) tells his sons more or less what Storey?s father told him and his brothers: ?I?ve spent half my life making sure none of you went down that pit.? (At 61, Storey?s father was diagnosed with a lung disease and given six months to live. Storyey recalls, ?I suggested I buy him and my mother a bungalow in Scarborough, which they knew from holidays. I said, it?s only six months, you might as well enjoy it. Twenty-three years later I was still paying the mortgage on that bungalow.? He conveys the news with deadpan disgruntlement. ?His health had been so much improved by the sea air?). At the age of 18, Storey was accepted to study painting at Bloomsbury?s acclaimed Slade School of Art in London. To finance his art education, he signed a 14 year contract with Leeds Rugby League Club as a professional footballer. ?For me, rugby was only a means to an end. It was very good security and enabled me to go to art school and start a new life.? He headed to London without looking back. ?My first night here, I was in the ABC caf? on the Euston Road, eating the cheapest meal, which was baked beans on toast, and thinking ?This is the happiest day of my life?.? He commuted to Leeds for weekend matches for four years.
It was on the train going back and forth to Leeds where Storey began writing. After more than a dozen rejections, his novel This Sporting Life was published by Longmans, Green in 1960 when Storey was 26. The novelist Caryl Phillips, who grew up in Leeds and has written widely on sport, calls it ?the best novel about sport I?ve read.? It won the MacMillan Fiction Award that year and was later adapted as a film directed by Lindsey Anderson and starring Richard Harris. He abandoned his dreams of becoming a painter and began writing full time. Storey?s arrival on the literary scene coincided with the ?second wave? of working-class and regional writers, who followed the Angry Young Men - Stan Barstow, Barry Hines, and John Braine among them. ?Their roots were firmly in the world that I grew up in,? writer Phillips says. ?They explored class tensions with an honesty I seldom saw in books by their southern contemporaries, who didn?t understand how important it was not to go down the pit, or what the difference was between the lounge and the public bar. Storey was to my mind the most sophisticated writer of the group.?
His second novel, Flight into Camden (1960), won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize while his third novel, Radcliffe (1963), won the Somerset Maugham Award. Saville (1976), won the Booker Prize for Fiction. His most recent novel, Thin-Ice Skater was published in 2004.
Storey had quit rugby after four years and began working as a teacher. When he came home one day to find another publishers? rejection slip, he recalls: ?I thought ?Perhaps I?m really a playwright? ? because there?s no description, only dialogue. So I sat down and wrote a play about a schoolteacher cracking up. It only took three days.?
Then it sat on a shelf for seven years. By the time the play, The Restoration of Arnold Middleton, was produced at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 1967 Storey was a successful novelist. ?The sheer exhilaration of seeing [the play] come alive on stage prompted me to write another five plays in no time at all, feeling that I?d found a whole new venture.?
He had had next to no experience of the theatre, but Lindsay Anderson, who ran the socially conscious Royal Court set about producing the plays, one after another. Anderson, with whom Storey had formed a close working relationship during the filming of This Sporting Life, was to be the director, eventually doing nine Storey plays at the Royal Court and the National Theatre. With Anderson, Storey had ?an almost mystical relationship?, even though their aesthetic approaches were quite different. ?Lindsay always started with a total picture of what he was doing whereas I started with just one line and went on to see what kind of thing accrued to the detail. We worked towards the centre from opposite sides of the ring.?
The nature of the Royal Court was as important to Storey as the character of his familiar director. ?There was a great vitality there. I don?t think I?d been to the theatre more than half a dozen times before that, usually reluctantly, having been dragged by relatives. The theatre in Wakefield was closed most of the time.?
In what is seen as the writers? heyday, a dozen other plays followed: The Contractor (1969), HOME (1970) and The Changing Room (1972), all of which won the New York Critics Best Play of the Year Award; In Celebration (1969), which was adapted as a film in 1974 starring Alan Bates; The Farm (1973) and Life Class (1975). All of these plays were first performed at the Royal Court Theatre where Storey served as associate artistic director from 1972-1974. Early Days (1980), The March on Russia (1989), and Stages (1992) all premiered at the Royal National Theatre.
In 1971, at the height of his success, the theatre historian John Russell Taylor wrote that Storey?s plays were ?beautifully shaped... so much so that critics have started bandying the name of Chekhov about?. Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Oxford Stage Company, who recently has been remounting Storey?s works, says of the plays that ?they have a theatricality that people love.? For Dromgoole, ?there is no more true inheritor of Chekhov?s gift? (adding that Storey himself would probably regard that opinion as ?complete cock?).
Storey resembles Chekhov in allowing his plays to progress by way of feeling, and being in no hurry to make things happen on stage. As in his novels, the emotion gradually increases until it stifles situations that were themselves deadening. Dromgoole stresses the point that Storey?s plays are tailored for the proscenium arch, ?If you take a Storey play out of the proscenium arch, and try to do it in a studio context, it wobbles.?
Most of Storey?s plays were written in two or three days. In the case of HOME ? celebrated for the double-act of John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson ? he wrote two separate versions, equally quickly. When he came to consider them, the one he had thought better seemed dead whereas the version he believed to be a failure came to life. Initially baffled by the play?s abrupt fragmented exchanges, silences and non-sequiturs, the two theatrical knights learned to trust both director and author, and had one of the greatest successes of their later careers.
HOMEis considered Storey?s simplest and yet most enigmatic play. His ability to take a simple image and make it resonant is clearly demonstrated in this work. Since not much appears to happen externally and exchanges are abrupt fragments, it was immediately compared to Pinter and Beckett at its New York premiere on November 17, 1970 at the Morosco Theater.
HOME received Tony nominations for Best Play, Best Direction, Best Actress, and two for Best Actor. The New York Times called Home ?a compassionate and moving play,? with writing ?extraordinarily pungent?Its skill is in capturing spontaneity and freezing it into art.?
TACT
New York City, March 2005
WORKS
This Sporting Life 1960 - novel
Flight into Camden 1960 - novel
Radcliffe 1963 - novel
The Restoration of Arnold Middleton 1967 - play
In Celebration 1969 - play
Home 1970 - play
The Contractor 1970 - play
Pasmore 1972 - novel
The Changing Room 1972 - play
A Temporary Life 1973 - novel
Cromwell 1973 - play
Edward 1973 - play
The Farm 1973 - play
Life Class 1975 - play
Saville 1976 - novel
Sisters 1978 - play
Mother's Day 1979 - play
Early Days 1980 - play
A Prodigal Child 1982 - novel
Present Times 1984 - novel
Phoenix 1985 - play
The March on Russia 1989 - play
Stages 1992 - play
Caring (one act), 1992 - play
Storey's Lives: Poems 1951-1991 1992
A Serious Man 1998 - novel
As It Happened 2002 - novel
Thin-Ice Skater 2004 - novel
PRIZES AND AWARDS
1959 Macmillan Fiction Award
1961 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
1963 Somerset Maugham Award
1967 Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright
1969 New York Critics Best Play Award, The Contractor
1970 New York Critics Best Play Home
1971 Evening Standard Award Best Play Home
1971 New York Critics Best Play The Changing Room
1971 Tony Award Best Play (nominated) Home
1972 Booker Prize for Fiction
1973 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize
1973 Tony Award for Best Play (nominated) The Changing Room
1976 Booker Prize for Fiction
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