Brighton Festival and the HOUSE Festival of visual arts are both themed around ideas of home and place this year, and Catherine Ireton extends the theme to the Brighton Fringe, in a pleasing convergence of festival activity.
Leaving Home Party is a song cycle that explores what it’s like to leave your verdant, comfortable but restrictive home, in this case Limerick, and move somewhere new, such as Edinburgh. Not a huge leap geographically, or culturally, but for a young Catherine in 2005 it was a journey and experience that disturbed her soul.
Catherine uses her pure, lilting voice in a series of songs that tell her story factually while building an emotional landscape; there is a touch of Mary Hampton in the delicacy of her compositions. Using the Chinese buvu flute and hulusi pipes, along with a bodhran and Indian shruti box, accompanist Ignacio Agrimbau hints at Irish folk in a rich palette of sounds. He is very much a partner in the piece and it puzzles me, as with Groomed, that the on-stage performer isn’t introduced to us until the end of the show; to acknowledge him early would sit easily with the conversational form used here. The show was first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe 2014, directed by Caroline Byrne, and this pared down, simple staging, with just some back-wall projections, focuses attention on the performers, the limited range of movement fitting the narrative.
We do not get much detail as to what exactly happened in the four or so years Catherine spent in the UK. She leaves us hungry to know more about the boyfriends, the jobs, and her family. Instead she evokes a sense of what the Portugese call saudade and the Greeks nostalgos: a deep longing for home. The differences in Irish and British terminology initially wrong-foot her, the free contraception astounds her – ‘they’re practically encouraging it!’
Catherine sees her life as a circle, and the form of the piece is circular too; a circle that keeps to a level plane rather than a roller-coaster. I’d have liked a few more bumps. The songs loop and refrains repeat, keeping the story fluid.
The show comes to life in a song about her great-grandmother, a bold, adventurous woman who travelled the world but died ten miles from where she was born in Ireland. Catherine feels adrift having just crossed the North Sea. She knows that her passivity is not an asset and criticizes herself for it; ‘I put my plans in other people’s hands,’ she sings. She makes the point that the simplest of things can change a course of action; in her case, a mobile phone contract, a fairly universal observation. The main message from the piece, that home is where you are now, is not profound, but it is heartfelt.
Catherine is an assured performer with bags of charm and a voice that can take you places. If Leaving Home Party lacks the punch and originality of Buddug James Jones’s Hiraeth it’s an enjoyable journey nonetheless, and worthy of a home-coming party.