Homeless. Hens and Chickens Theatre.

One has to admire the consistency of director Moses Hao’s contribution to the Camden Fringe 2023. Earlier in the week he gave us a bleak and impenetrable piece of devised theatre about an immigrant man and his washing machine. In Homeless he provides a bleak and almost as impenetrable piece about an immigrant man and his dog. Baffling collective creations about migrants are possibly emblematic of his contemporary directorial journey.

Homeless, which covers three days in the life of an apparently psychotic rough sleeper (Aman Anam who also writes), at least has the benefit of dialogue to give us some guidance as to the direction of travel. Anam’s character calls himself “sexy today, Dexi tomorrow, and Maxi the day after” but perhaps we will just stick with Dexi. The piece opens with Dexi rifling the pockets of a fellow beggar whose head is hidden in a dustbin and whose legs stick out. There may be some kind of reference to Nagg and Nell from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame here; the tone of Hao’s piece is every bit as harrowing but lacks the comedy.

It transpires that the beggar in the dustbin (Vkin Vats) is in fact Dexi’s narcoleptic dog. In between smoking ciggies, drinking shots, sleeping, and robbing fruit from Sainsbury’s, Vats barks, whines, growls, and groans at passing strangers. “You are my brother” Dexi tells his hound, which is about as helpful as character establishment gets here. Vaks reappears mid-way the 55 minute piece through wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and later a smart jacket and tie.

Dexi, played with a kind of wild-eyed, beard-scratching, feral detachment by Anam, enters into a stream-of-consciousness style dialogue, partly with his dog, partly with his fractured inner self, and partly with the unsympathetic people he comes into contact with. He thinks “zombies are real”. He used to be movie star and a pilot. He has a million dollars, but no bank will let him open an account. Hats off to Anam and Hao for taking a crack at presenting the lived experience of homelessness and mental illness, but in the end, you may struggle to find any point of human connection with Dexi. His world is simply too broken and opaque for that.

Writer: Aman Anam

Director: Moses Hao