At this time of year, the emotional pull of home is strong – either you have been back in the bosom of family, or you have pondered why you were so far away. Hometown celebrates that innate sense of belonging that is the birthright of every child in the world. But this new Spare Parts Puppet Theatre show also explores the inevitable – and necessary – impulse of every child to look beyond home as they emerge into adulthood.
Writer and illustrator Shaun Tan would qualify for a PhD in his exploration of Coming Home, Seeking Home and Leaving Home, if such degrees existed. This reviewer’s first experience of both Tan’s genius as a graphic novelist and Spare Parts’ creative interpretation of his work was seeing The Arrival, an award-winning 2006 adaptation of Tan’s story about the migrant or refugee experience. The plight of suitcase-holding outsider Aki was so poignant it brought tears, despite the wonderful tension-relieving antics of performers like Giri Mazzella and Sanjiva G Margio.
In the intervening years, several of Perth-raised Tan’s whimsical and poetic works have been expertly adapted by Spare Parts. And Hometown is no different, drawing inspiration from his anthology Here I Am. Except Tan is still developing the book’s content, and it hasn’t been published yet. The creative leeway that incompleteness affords has enabled Spare Parts’ puppeteers to shape elements of Here I Am into their own original musical work, Hometown – and Tan is apparently delighted with the result.
‘Here I Am’ becomes a key phrase in the theme song’s refrain and is sung with gusto by a small pigtailed girl puppet. “Here I am, and life is good, good, good… Welcome to my neighbourhood!” she tells us. It’s the refrain every parent wants to hear, a child secure in their small family world. She goes on: “Pretty normal, nothing spesh [special]. Pull up a chair and be my guest, everything is fine in my hometown.”
But what the audience sees is hardly ‘pretty normal’– a parade of gorgeously vivid alien beings emerging from the black box background of this puppet show. The girl is so visibly different from her sun goddess mother with wide embracing wings, her father who comically resembles an amalgam of men’s shed paraphernalia and her brothers of indeterminate shapes and species. Yet the girl clearly adores them all, even though “no one else in my family wonders, like I do, ‘what’s out there?’”
And then one day, a space-suited someone who literally resembles her falls from the sky. He tells her he comes from a place where everyone looks like her, so she must accompany him to his home town. What unfolds are the girl’s musings on a life-altering decision and her surprising ultimate choice.
Hometown is blessed with a dream creative team, starting with the black-clothed, hood-wearing puppeteers Amberly Cull and Nick Pages Oliver who wrote the adaptation and, with Bec Bradley, brilliantly manipulate a dozen puppets designed by Leon Hendroff (and fabricated by A Blanck Canvas).
Hendroff’s artistry deserves special mention. It makes an alien setting and its inhabitants somehow inviting, even cuddly, for audiences of five years upwards. The settings range from strange spongy hills and strings of plankton-like forms that playfully embrace the girl to a Chinese landscape of weirdly shaped trees in flower, under which the girl and the stranger meet.
Lighting design by Megan Fitzgerald is a critical element in a show that uses light as a magic tool to conjure up entire worlds. One memorable image is of a space suit drifting upward from blackness toward a blue filtered light, like the surface of a deep ocean.
Hometown’s delightfully hummable score by composer Melanie Robinson (with sound design by Lee Buddle) is beautifully rendered by her musician partner Iain Grandage and Karl Florisson, with pitch-perfect, playful singing of the girl role by the multiskilled Amberly Cull.
Read: Theatre review: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne
Artistic director Philip Mitchell deserves accolades for the ambition and quality of this new production, which Mitchell himself directed. Despite the grim vicissitudes of creating art in Perth, this company does not falter in delivering the highest standards for children. To that extent, as the show’s refrain goes, “Everything is fine in my hometown.” So take your favourite child to see it.
Hometown, Claremont Showground
Adapting Writers: Amberly Cull and Nick Pages Oliver
Director: Philip Mitchell
Composer: Melanie Robinson
Designer: Leon Hendroff
Sound Designer: Lee Buddle
Musicians: Iain Grandage and Karl Florisson
Lighting Designer: Megan Fitzgerald
Performers: Bec Bradley, Nick Pages-Oliver, Amberly Cull
Tickets: $29
Hometown will be performed until 25 January 2025.
