Alex Roberts & Co’s No Place Like Home comes to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe and the Pleasance Dome having already won the Les Enfants Terribles Award, and offers a fascinating look at how queer venues may not always be the safe sanctuary they should be.
Alex Roberts performs this pacy monologue that fuses spoken work and dance music. The room is pumping as we enter the 10 Dome venue, with Roberts dancing to a projected backdrop. These projections continue for most of the production, accentuating elements of the storytelling. They look fantastic and make for a very visually arresting piece.
Roberts tells the story of Connor and Rob, the first is new to the scene and carries a certain innocence with him, while Rob has been around much longer, he is “a man not a boy” as Connor observes. Roberts embodies these characters, and flips between the two with a quick rotation of a baseball cap. Roberts also serves as a third party narrator, a regular of the club that has seen it all before.
The storytelling is rich and vivid, but what is most impressive is the way that Roberts matches the rhythm of the spoken word to the beat of the music, which combined with the projections all comes together beautifully.
This is a demanding performance with heavy themes of violence in the LGBTQ+ community, but Roberts performs with an easy going style that helps the audience to navigate the ever so slightly wandering plot.
No Place Like Home interrogates what is a safe space, and asks if members of the LGBTQ+ community are ever really safe? The answer may not be clear cut, but this production is a sensitively thought provoking way of asking the question.
