Honey, I'm elsewhere: Aliki Tsakoumi grapples with the idea of home in this storytelling piece.
Aliki Tsakoumi sits within a filmed and recreated Stockholm, a self-made home since she moved to Sweden from Greece in 2018. There's a simultaneously familiar and false quality to the home video: it's a beautiful seascape, but not the true thing when projected against a black box space. Tsakoumi's show follows this dichotomy and sits in the uncertainty present even in the show title's question mark.
"Her stand up morphs quickly into storytelling, but whilst the joke counts drops off the more mellow tone feels far better suited to her struggle to identify where one truly feels at home."
Tsakoumi grounds her knowledge of her Swedish audience by first uprooting and planting the same demographic as tourists in her homeland of Greece. This is a clever move which gives Tsakoumi the "upper hand" of being an insider, and offers her the chance to deliver some tight if crude observational comedy. Her stand up morphs quickly into storytelling, but whilst the joke counts drops off the more mellow tone feels far better suited to her struggle to identify where one truly feels at home.
This is a one woman, one audience member show, with the camera trained on the man in the audience for his responses and reactions. The interaction between the two, one Greek and one Swedish, gives a nice sense of international connection but when there's a maintained camera focus and no reveal that he's the only person watching at the venue until the end, it becomes distracting for online viewers (akin to sitting in the theatre and constantly checking a stranger's reactions to gauge your own).
There is a slight twist as to this audience member's identity as the show concludes, and this does explain the concentration on him but still leaves the detraction from Tsakoumi herself and her original "where is home" hypothesis for the majority of the piece. The ending itself feels fairly abrupt and fails to grapple with Tsakoumi's earlier insecurity regarding the temporality of connections made abroad. This may be a deliberate effort, but regardless the show definitely pulls off its aim of wider contemplation after the seascape's faded.
How Do You Know You are Home is available to watch on demand until 30th August, find out more and buy tickets here.