Light Falls - REX Manchester

[BurlyBeaR]

 “LOOK ME IN THE EYE AND TELL ME YOU’LL NEVER LEAVE ME.”

A woman wakes up with a stranger beside her. A student argues with his lover. A single mother fights to feed her baby. A married man flirts with two younger women. And far away, one devastating event is about to change all their lives forever.

Artistic Director Sarah Frankcom says goodbye to the Royal Exchange with an extraordinary new play by Simon Stephens, with original music by Jarvis Cocker. Connecting five relatives in five disparate English towns, from Blackpool to Durham, LIGHT FALLS is a richly layered play about life in the face of death, about how our love survives us after we’ve gone – and about how family, community and kindness help the North survive.

24/10 to 16/11

[Deleted]

A beautiful, and beautifully written, elegiac character driven piece about everything and nothing.

At times like this, we need to be reminded of the essential goodness of people, our lives are not best reflected in extreme rhetoric but in tiny moments of kindness of human failings and of the fragility of it all.

The first half is a patchwork of individual lives that you sense will somehow cohere, the catalyst for that is laid out within the first, expansive monologue (keep ahold of the names, they matter).

The second half is the inevitable end.

It was during this half that the emotion took over, like water rising and covering the jagged, rough hewn landscape of the play’s northern topography. Stephens’ north is not the place of ignorance and insularity it might currently be seen as but a place of warmth and forgiveness. We need to know that now.

The chairs. It was the chairs.

A careless, careful arrangement of mismatched chairs in a room that only sees so many at such times.

We have little need for conflict and division. Not now. We need the memory of what binds us all.

What, in the end, do we leave? What does our passing precede?

At an unexpected moment, we are nourished.

Like rain from a clear northern sky.

[david]

I was at the matinee performance today. I'd agree with @cardinalpirelli in that Simon Stephens has written a really beautiful piece here. Whilst I felt it was quite a bleak play to watch (and from overhearing and talking with a few other patrons this afternoon many were of the same opinion) as the play progressed it was through the often dark roads that the different characters travelled down that by the end allowed them to find some peace in their own way.

Having in Act 1 the different characters tell their stories brought back memories of watching BLANK at the Domar last weekend. Whist in that production, I didnt care about any of those characters, in this production, I was more engaged with these people and their stories.

Despite the bleakness of the afternoon, thankfully there was some comedy to help lighten the mood. Lloyd Hutchinson as Bernard certainly got a few laughs during the afternoon as the Dad.

Castng wise, it was nice to see David Moorst fresh from his role at the Bridge's Midsummer Nights Dream in this production.

Overall, this is one of those plays that will be food for thought in the coming days in the messages that the playwright is conveying.