The audience wanders through the rooms of a house, a house of Life. As in an exhibition, they are free to visit different poetic spaces: my mother’s theatre dressing-room, her bedroom where a bed floats ghostlike from the ceiling, a halffilled suitcase gaping open, ready for the last journey. The “visitors” are invited to have tea and biscuits in my kitchen, a warm, cozy room where they are invited to snoop through personal family memorabilia, all brought from my actual home in England: souvenirs, books, photos and childhood films.

There is the teenager’s bedroom, vibrating with experimental electronic music and videos and the little girl’s bedroom, with its starry wallpaper and mountains of children’s books. On a small 60s tv, a black and white Peter Pan teaches the Darling children how to fly. The audience then enter a dark and claustrophobic room, black boxes piled up to the ceiling, inhabited by Geoffrey Carey, a magnificent actor in his seventies. He tells tragi-comic anecdotes about his life and youth, about his uncaring Hollywood tv star father, about his acting career, about hoarding. He embodies all the solitude and beauty of the ageing actor.

At specific moments, the audience is gathered for short bursts of theatre. The words are Chekhov’s. The timeless playwright is omnipresent in this House, his gentleness permeates the spaces with his love for humanity and for theatre. For me, Chekhov is intimately linked to my mother and her unforgettable interpretation of Ranevskaia in the Cherry Orchard, performed at the Bouffes du Nord, in Paris in the early 1980s. He also haunts my own theatre memories, having painfully played Nina in The Seagull several times, with all the inexperienced sufferings of a young actress.

Although all the material in this House is drawn from my personal experience, it has been thrilling to see that there is a universal resonance which touches the audience, even the very young ones, with a strong sense of shared emotions.