Review: Home Song, Talawa Studios, Fairfield Halls

It’s always lovely to carve out special time with your baby, and Home Song at Talawa Studio is exactly that. It offers a delightful 40 minutes to enjoy a shared sensory show that includes music, movement and easy interaction.

Talawa specialise in making Black theatre to be enjoyed by all audiences, and this time it’s ages 6-18 months who are treated to a colourful and heartwarming experience. This begins even before the show with the warm welcome from the team at Fairfield Halls, and wraparound facilities that ensure there’s an area to leave a buggy, changing tables, plus a space in the sun room to play with toys and settle in before the performance.

Cassiopeia Berkeley-Agyepong’s gentle tale follows the journey of a young girl and her mum, exploring the sights and sounds of the world around them, and it’s a carefully crafted sensory experience. The audience sit on a spacious floormat covered with textured materials that suggest the journey between Ghana and the UK depicted in the play. There’s soft but bumpy grass, a smooth suede river and rougher patches of yellow sand for the babies to touch and explore. The whole is canopied over with floaty materials, and it’s all in softly natural colours, creating an amiable and intimate atmosphere.

The music throughout the play is an absolute highlight. It’s performed by Halle Brown and Amina Gichinga, who sing beautifully a capella, telling the tale universally by harmonising sounds and words that mix languages and cultures. Following the theme of travel, suitcases are used inventively to sit on or for drumming against, and in parallel each baby is also given a small plastic ‘suitcase’ when they arrive. During the performance they’re encouraged to use it to explore new rhythms by tapping along with the actors, but it also contains sensory items that are relevant to the story, such as a shaker, autumn leaves, and ribbons the colours of London pigeons. These are all really easy to manage and allow the families to play together and with the new friends they’re sitting beside.

Gently suggesting ideas of migration and movement, at times there’s interesting reshaping of the space. Different lighting states subtly shift the focus from the performers to the audience themselves, moving around the group. The babies also enjoy seeing the stage divided up by long ribbons stretched across the floor, which they are able to approach with curiosity and twang with relish. Additional puppetry uses beautifully costumed child figures that interact close up with the babies, developing ideas in the narrative of navigating new friendships, and lovely shadow puppetry adds a dynamic extra dimension to the visual storytelling.

The babies are allowed to wander safely within the designated boundary throughout the show (which of course they do – and at speed!) but it’s also possible to step right out with their carer if a break is needed, so no pressure there. There’s even time allotted to stay and play for 20 minutes after the performance and leave when you’re ready. The whole experience feels comfortable from start to finish, and it’s a really great introduction to theatre for tiny people.

Created, Directed and Composed by: Cassiopeia Berkeley-Agyepong
Design by: Ruth Badila
Lighting Design by: Aisha Oyedepo
Movement & Puppetry Directed by: Aimee Louise Bevan
Puppet Makers: Olivia Racionzer and Emily Wright
Produced by: Talawa Theatre Co and Unicorn Theatre

Home Song is recommended for ages 6-18 months and runs at Tawala Studio, Fairfield Halls until Saturday 12 April.