An arresting portrayal of a deprived Northern community, brilliantly written and performed.
Sunrise for the Blind is a beautifully simple – and bleakly realistic – play. Writer Lee Lomas brings us into the town centre of a Northern working class community and introduces us to seven characters, each chained to traditions, expectations, struggle from which they can’t escape.
Friends Mark (Marcus Hudson) and Nathan (Lee Lomas) walk on in tracksuits and speak in rapid back-and-forth. They speculate on ‘Becci the Bike’ shagging ‘Ginger Tom’ and Nathan admits he has his eyes on fit Ashley. Mark works in the corner shop where store owner, Leena, encourages him to think about university – and where he sees Ashley buy a pregnancy test. Gossip spirals, the boys speculate, but it is actually Becci who is pregnant.
Longing is everywhere; Mark laments his childhood bike rides which took him further out of town than he has been in years, Becci is desperate to chase away the slag branding the town has given her, Nathan wants Ashley. Whilst the younger generation yearn, the older generation rage, and racism rears its ugly head. Becci’s sour-faced mother, brilliantly played by Sonja Doubleday, moans that she ‘can’t say the word brown’ and stomps her feet with hateable teenage petulance. Ashley’s father stumbles on stage, alternating between the bookies and hateful outpourings towards Leena, his anger at his struggles in an unequal world all placed upon migrant communities.
Lomas is brutally economical with his writing. The characters speak in short sentences, use simple words, and echo refrains back at each other. ‘It’s alright’ becomes increasingly oppressive and what is felt but not ever said hangs limply in the air. Only in the very last scene, after a descent into violence that ruins Mark’s hopes of university, does Nathan find the language to say what he really feels. He dreams of leaving, but fears he won’t; he believes Becci was right to abort her unborn child rather than let it be born here.
Sunrise for the Blind is realised with a starkness that matches the writing. The stage is completely empty, the only props are the cigarettes, the passing of time is denoted by big loud thuds. It is set in the round with the audience forming a sort of cage around the actors, forced to look down on the action in a way that adds to the discomfort. Director Andrew Elkins expertly moves the actors around the liminal space – and the acting itself is stunning. Hudson and Lomas have electric chemistry, and Hollie Burgess as Becci perfectly captures the nervous claustrophobia of a young girl in an adult situation.
Lomas wrote Sunrise for the Blind in 2016 and the programme notes that in the ten years since, the political landscape has only deteriorated further. That the play may be more pertinent now is horribly depressing. Yet it remains a brilliant, timeless piece of writing, and in this production, it is also brilliantly performed.
Sunrise for the Blind was on at The Cockpit 27th -28th August.