A play about insomnia is welcome relief for many of us who stew, bug-eyed, into the small hours and know that sleeplessness bears its own maddening drama. Directed by Mike Alfreds, it begins promisingly, with five characters in pyjamas making snarky asides about other people’s useless advice for their malaise (yoga, magnesium flakes, breathing and body scans). They pull up chairs and begin speaking in alternating snatches of their nightly torments, daily burdens, former lives and past loves.
The central conceit around the lack of sleep and its effects is disappointingly underexplored and seems, instead, like an excuse for characters to give us personal histories and disjointed vignettes. They do not interact with each other but give us thoughts and memories in isolation; as one talks the others recline in states of anguish – head in hands, slumped, hugging a chair or the wall. Mystifyingly, they speak of themselves in the first and third person, sometimes switching between the two in the same sentence, which is jarring and brings oddness to the storytelling.
The play’s characters and script were devised by several company actors at ViSiBLE Theatre Ensemble, which focuses on creating work about later life. It is refreshing to see five characters – and actors – of a certain age on stage. Some speak of holding on to their working lives, others look back at it wistfully, and occasionally they refer to the far bigger sleep of their own mortality, though we want more of this contemplation too.
Helen (Sally Knyvette) is a plummy woman who is proud of her kitchen extension and ruminates on her schooldays; Bill (Vincenzo Nicoli) is a failed actor who becomes a chef but crumbles when he loses his second job; Hugo (Gary Lilburn) is an Irish artist who self-medicates with drink and pills; Terry (Geraldine Alexander) has been her mother’s carer for the past decade while Harvey (Andrew Hawkins) is a teacher forced into retirement.
The women on the whole stick to reminiscing about friends and family while the men spend more time remembering infidelities and sexual encounters. Their monologues, ironically, have their own soporific moments as Terry complains about the ironing, Helen goes over incidents at her school while Harvey rants about neoliberalism and past governments. The sad and dramatic parts of their lives – the death of a daughter, heartbreak, divorce – do not have the effect they should, and this play ultimately comes to feel like five character studies in search of a more joined-up story.
• At Southwark Playhouse, London, until 21 May.
