Sunshine

Red Stitch and playwright Tom Holloway have enjoyed a long symbiotic relationship, each playing a part in the growth of the other, so it’s fitting that Holloway’s new play should have its world premiere with the company that has played such a large role in the development of the work.

Has that development paid off? That’s for the individual to decide but the result is an abstract tonal poem consisting of 4 inner monologues, occasionally in unison, but more often discordant harmonies; often brilliant, but equally indulgent in its mundanities. This is the music of life itself, and (like life itself) it’s often hard for the audience to engage or connect with – and without connection to and with an audience, the point of any expression, abstract or otherwise, is lost.

Von Bibra is a director of immense taste and empathy who creates harmony from discordance. A lesser director might have been less successful. But Von Bibra pushes us to question our own inner dialogue, our idiosyncratic self-absorption clashing with our need to connect, to belong, to be recognised. The result, in musical terms, is Schoenberg which too often morphs into Stockhausen and emotion is lost in disparity, so that the form becomes an intellectual device rather than a visceral experience.

Basically 4 actors rise from the dirt and we follow their enigmatic journey as they seek to discover who they truly are and how others see them.

The cast is excellent, though sometimes they appear to be fighting the text. Each is defined by a signature tune. There’s Man 1 (stunningly realised by George Lingard), stuck in the self absorption of childhood, humming a Hanson song. Man 2, Philip Hayden is obsessed with Billy Joel’s “The Stranger”, not realising that the comfort zone of happiness he has created for himself is a fantasy. He has some stunning moments. Ella Caldwell gives one of her strongest performances as Woman 1, eaten up with the need for self gratification, and Caroline Lee (Woman 2) plays grief as a haunting melody in a minor key, giving us the clearest vision of what it is to be human, despite the fact that her song “You are my Sunshine” was written before she was born. She is stunning. Their paths do cross, late in the piece (which ran an unacceptable two hours without a break), but it almost seems anti-climactic when it happens.

The last, very conventional, scene – where two people find connection through need, seems at odds and anachronistic in the overall context, like a coda from a different song.

It’s great thing that we have local playwrights willing to push the boundaries, but we must be vigilant about style over substance.

Back in the 1970s the people’s poet, Rod McKuen, wrote of life

“We come into the world alone,

We go away the same.

We’re meant to spend the interlude between

In Closeness,

Or so we tell ourselves,

But it’s a long way from the morning

To the evening.”

That may not be as intellectually stimulating as Holloway’s take, but it’s something we can all connect with.

Coral Drouyn

Image: George Lingard, Ella Caldwell, PhilHayden and Caroline Lee. Photo by Jodie Hutchinson.