About the Play:

Home was one of Royal National Theatre of Britain's top 100 plays of the 20th century.

Home is a full-length drama by David Storey. A modern-day classic play about four friends who meet in a park to converse about life's events only to slowly reveal the reality of their strange circumstances. Why are they together? How long have they been there? Who else might they encounter along the way? David Storey's mysterious tale provides vast reassurance that life's occurrences will not always be what they seem.

Home is about five apparently unrelated characters who aren't quite what – and where – they seem to be. On a bare terrace stroll two old gentlemen, who greet each other courteously. What they discuss is superficially anything that can pass the time: the past, the weather, old friends, moustache-styles, and the war. Are they perhaps in a small private hotel? But all is not quite what it seems, and soon enough we realize we are actually on the grounds of a mental hospital, and these old men are patients. With astonishingly sparse dialogue, by the time the day is over and the shadows fall, your audience is moved to compassion, sympathy, and respect for these extraordinarily ordinary men. What is portrayed is the very essence of England, Englishness, class, unfulfilled ambition, loves lost and homes that no longer exist. David Storey's timeless play is a beautiful, compassionate, tragic and darkly funny study of the human mind and a once-great nation coming to terms with its new place in the world.

Home premiered in 1970 at the Royal Court in London, starred Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson, and subsequently transferred to Broadway's Morosco Theatre the same year, winning the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Play of the Year. The play has been performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female, 5 male

What people say:

"David Storey's beautiful 1970 play about old age, mental infirmity and what Virgil called 'the tears in mortal things' is one of the glories of modern drama." — The Guardian

"A most rich and compassionate play. It is funny, sprightly and uplifting ... the writing is extraordinarily pungent, its skill is in capturing spontaneity and freezing it into art. A lovely play, a sad play." — The New York Times

"A sad Wordsworthian elegy about the solitude and dislocation of madness and possibly about the decline of Britain itself ... part of the play's appeal is that Storey leaves us to draw our own conclusions ... a play that contains within itself the still, sad music of humanity." — The Guardian

"David Storey's Home is a magical play that's been revived far too infrequently since it made its debut in 1970." — Toronto Star

About the Playwright:

David Malcolm Storey (1933-2017) was a well-known English playwright, screenwriter, and poet as well as an award-winning novelist and a former professional rugby league player. The son of a coal miner, he was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England and earned a diploma from the Slade School of Art in London. His early life as a professional rugby player and an art student influenced his works. He documented much of this in his seventh novel Saville, which won the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 1976.