REVIEW: Unfamiliar At Home, Online Streaming ✭✭✭✭

Paul T Davies reviews Victor Esses and Yorgos Petrou in Unfamiliar At Home streaming online until 25 November.

Victor Esses and Yorgos Petrou Unfamiliar at Home. Streaming until 25th November

4 Stars

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2020 has been so frustrating and depressing for live theatre, but it has also created great ingenuity and surprising work, reaching a wider audience. Such a case is Unfamiliar at Home, written and performed live on Zoom by Victor Esses and Yorgos Petrou and streamed from their home. Having recently made some big plans, the piece charts their discussions and development of this piece, (originally titled Unfamiliar and having some performances last year), and their decision to have a baby. Streamed from their home, the domestic details give the play a raw sensitivity, their openness and discussions about big issues blending with the minutiae of everyday life and partnerships.

The cameras show us the floor of the lounge and the living space, the kitchen, and a phone camera, focus moving between each angle. Beginning with “Remember when”, we learn how unreliable memory can be as they outline how they met, and the important milestones of their relationship. The floor space allows both closeness and separation as they work their way through challenges, and recordings made of friends who are parents are played. Interestingly, as the play progresses, internal homophobia and the homophobia expressed by certain surrogate agencies and surrogates are exposed, and these political issues do become the personal as we watch Victor and Yorgos question whether they are doing the right thing.

There is little performance here, I think, as both men are being themselves, and the confessional nature of their home makes it real and they are to be applauded for their openness. Like Esses’s earlier piece, Where to Belong, it is performed with gentleness, and I wondered if occasionally some rage would disrupt the calm pattern of the show, Yorgus wraps himself up in microphone leads and the rug at some point, a rare glimpse of the frustration they feel and the way we work out our emotions in another room to spare our partner seeing it. It plays mainly on one level and there are no disruptive transitions between scenes. However, its gentleness is its strength because the piece is about love and family, and the ending, when they talk almost directly to us, is beautiful in its honesty. It brings us right up to date about where they are on the surrogacy journey.  For what it’s worth, I think they will be great parents.