This play offers an insightful and sensitive take on what it means to love, to lose and to live on. Blending wit with thoughtful direction, Be Home Soon presents a unique blend of past and present and questions what may happen in a future you don’t want to face.
Full of existential musings and philosophical addresses, the production flits between two time zones, one of budding and exciting romance, the other of an awkward flat share, the audience unaware of where present and past reside. As the intimacy blossoms between Raf and Mel, the audience tumbles along on a whirlwind romance with them, from meeting in a gallery, to a spontaneous trip to France, to finally ‘drunk on love’ dancing in the kitchen. A love story that, sadly but inherently, is too good to be true.
The alternative time zone follows the aftermath of happiness in a new flat with a new individual and exposes the conflict of keeping memories alive while allowing the heart to heal. The powerful writing explores whether home is a flat with a stranger that feels all too unfamiliar, or a person, with whom a rare connection is enough to form a life. As Raf grapples with who he is ‘after’ he found home in a person, not a place, he unpacks memories hidden in pictures and songs and confronts his desires to do what is safe and keep them locked away by coming to accept that the man ‘now’ is not the same as the man ‘then’.
The instability of youth is beautifully captured in this performance as the three characters encounter the conflict between what is safe and what is desirable. What does it take to be remembered? To have had money or to have had purpose?
At the close of the play, all the memories have been unpacked before the audience, and the room starts to feel like ‘home’. The understanding reached between characters that home is whatever and wherever you make it shows the common humanity that binds us all and that memories made stay with us forever, so it is foolish to pack them away.
Be Home Soon is on at 12:45pm at Greenside @ Infirmary Street – Olive Studio, from 8 to 12 August. Tickets available here: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on#q=%22Be%20Home%20Soon%22
Image provided to The Student as press material.