- Ticket price:
- From: £16.50
- Running time:
- 1hr 10mins (no interval)
- Age range:
- 14+
- Audience guidance:
- This show depicts themes of institutional oppression, class prejudice and racism, including the infrequent use of racial slurs
Uma - with her defiant wit and boundless energy - tries to stand up to everything and everyone she encounters. Will Uma, and her trusty bear Bess, ever find their way home.
Uma Taylor is a healthy, curious and rowdy seven-year-old living in 1950s London with her working-class parents Ronnie and Shaheen, and her brothers Raj and Eric. When an examination at a local child welfare clinic sees Uma sent to a children’s convalescence home in the country for an indeterminate period, she is promised fresh air, good food and exercise. Instead she encounters the formidable Matron, racist staff and peers, and crushing indifference to her loneliness.
About the show:
The Home offers a virtuoso solo performance, with lead actor Genevieve Sabherwal playing ten characters and voices. The show combines physical theatre, shadow puppetry, object manipulation, an interactive set, dynamic lighting from a self-contained rig, and sound design and songs -both recorded and sung live -including an original recording of the writer’s father singing in a working-class pub in the 1950s.
Uma’s determined, and often comedic, resistance to the fragmentation of family, institutional oppression and racism is funny and deeply moving. The personal odyssey of this tiny, defiant figure makes audiences laugh and cry. The politics of the story are as relevant today as they were seventy years ago.
Exquisitely executed, creating a theatricality that's rare in a solo showThe Scotsman
Brilliantly evokedThe Times
Such a moving piece of work - outstandingBroadway Baby