Theatre: Light Falls
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester (0161-833 9833). Until 16 November Running time: 2hrs 30mins
★★★★
Light Falls has the “air of an event”, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. It’s the fifth play that Simon Stephens has written for the Royal Exchange, and it marks the end of his longterm collaboration with Sarah Frankcom, its artistic director, who has come to the end of her tenure there. And this intriguing, elusive play shows both Stephens and Frankcom at their best. It is a “love letter” by a Londonbased writer to his native soil – northern England; and it’s also an “unfashionable testament to the power of family life”. The “tender and soulful” story combines intertwined narratives in which three young adults are “all searching for love through loneliness”, said Matt Barton on What’s On Stage. Gradually, the plot converges on Christine, beautifully played by Rebecca Manley, a character we have seen at the beginning of the play narrating what turns out to be her own sudden death, from a brain haemorrhage, in a supermarket.
Christine, we soon realise, is the mother of the three troubled souls, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Although dead, she dwells “fabulistically” among the living, keeping watch over her husband and offspring and speaking to them via other characters and apparitions. “It could be the stuff of Hollywood hokum. Yet the writing, by turns droll and lyrical, makes it ring true.” And Manley brings such “intensity and calm assurance” to the difficult role of Christine that we buy into the “brazen” theatrical device, and enter “a realm of numinous possibility”. A “shanty-like contribution” from Jarvis Cocker, titled Hymn of the
North – sung in snatches and then given fully realised choral life in the closing stages – adds to a “necessary and curiously life-affirming evening”.
I’m afraid I found the play “grand in ambition, but drab in execution”, said Clive Davis in The Times. The script offers little beyond “bleak family psychodrama”. When Stephens’ writing is at its best, it is “rip-your-heart-out stuff, undeniably true and laced with spiky humour”, said Francesca Peschier in The Stage. Here, alas, he hits those heights only intermittently, in a drama that is long on mood but short on action.