The Scotsman,
Saturday 10^th May 2008

Hoose and Hame

The Arches, Glasgow

*****

ALEX Salmond’s breezily confident SNP government may be riding high in the opinion polls, a year after its election; but its ascendancy seems to be producing a few furrowed brows among the younger generation of Scottish artists. Helen Cuinn is one of them, a wacky young product of the RSAMD’s Contemporary Theatre Practice course who – in a brief but occasionally vivid show – ponders the questions of identity and belonging, and wonders how someone brought up in Scotland (but not Glasgow, sorry), with a Welsh father who was born in Berlin, is supposed to understand her identity, in this age of modern nationalism-lite.

It’s not, of course, that Cuinn really gets to grips with the theme. Equipped with little beyond a mobile door and a few two-dimensional paper props (beard, bird, gun in holster, handbag, moustache), she starts well by considering Caledonian attitudes to the four points of the compass – her brief attempts at pronouncing the word ‘south’ in a suitably estuarine accent are brilliant – and then moves off into a strange mixture of interesting confessional and third-rate student clowning.

Her finest moment comes when she whips the audience into a Nazi-rally-style choral rendition of the Wee Cooper o’ Fife, causing the previously locked door to spring obediently open. But the show suffers from lack of systematic engagement with its theme. And you don’t need a box of biscuits from different nations, distributed round the audience, to answer questions about whether this is Scotland, Britain or Europe. The answer is that it is all three, obviously; and it’s with that recognition that any real debate on identity begins.

 Joyce McMillan

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Helen Cuinn's solo show, 'Hoose and Hame', manages that most difficult of tasks: tackling the profound and the pressing with a lightness of touch. She brings home to the audience the complexity of 'home' . Though this might be about Helen's insightful and shifting perspectives on 'hame', we're all invited through her gleaming green stage door into an expansive home that resonates beyond the local, the singular or the personal. Expertly working with her audience, Helen transforms the anonymous theatre into a homely space resonating with moments of shared recognition. Importantly, this sense of familiarity is strategically disrupted by moments of the absurd and strange, with the 'hoose and hame' becoming something a little more uncanny. This is a performer with a sharp and probing intelligence and a superb sense of dramaturgy and stage aesthetics. Leaving 'Hoose and Hame' I had a warm glow, as though I'd been spent the evening sitting round a roaring hearth, mesmerised by the boundless and captivating energy of the flame.