‘Home’ is the latest work from Australian independent theatre collective The Nest Ensemble, written by Margi Brown Ash and co-devised with Leah Mercer.

“It’s about how we re-story our lives and by re-story I mean look at our pasts in a different light. So something might have happened and you look back and think, ‘oh my God I wish that didn’t happen’, and then you look back again and you see that there was actually some really good things that came out of that experience,” says Brown Ash.

With four young adolescents at home, this theatre-maker of 40 years decided to become a therapist and from this the basis of the show developed. “The idea of re-storying or finding new ways of seeing the stories of your life, that’s the way I counsel and coach so I thought this is a really interesting approach to storytelling,” she says.

The Nest Ensemble will also provide a workshop halfway through the season to give participants the opportunity to grow their own stories using different artforms, which will be weaved into the play the following week. “We wanted a community piece. We wanted a piece so when people come to this particular play, it’s not just about being entertained but about being provided a container where you can reflect on your own stories and see the wonderful experiences that you’ve had and to build on them, so it’s very uplifting,” she says.

Together Brown Ash and Mercer travelled to Israel, Mexico and the USA developing the show, as well as performing versions of it, and are yet to have anyone leave not changed in some way. “I had one response from a young women, she was in her mid 20s, and she said to me, ‘I left home at 14 and you’ve made me turn around and reassess that so thank you’. After the experience of watching the show and having talked afterwards, she is now going to go back and see her parents, and that’s not a isolated example,” Brown Ash says.

“I am, of course, nervous because these stories come out of my life and my life is very ordinary. It’s just a regular life and that’s the point of the whole thing — that we embody our ordinary stories and out of that, find the extraordinariness of our stories.”

‘Home’ premieres at La Boite Indie from July 18 to July 28.