This has the air of an event. It is the fifth play Simon Stephens has written for this space and it is Sarah Frankcom’s final production as the Royal Exchange’s artistic director. Both artists are happily on their best form: Stephens’s ability to celebrate human resilience in the face of adversity is matched by the characteristic clarity of Frankcom’s production.
As so often, Stephens reveals his penchant for geographical restlessness. In Harper Regan (2008), he sent his eponymous heroine on an odyssey through the north of England. Light Falls begins with a monologue by middle-aged Christine (Rebecca Manley), who records the exact moment of her death in a Stockport supermarket in February 2017. We then see where the scattered members of her family were on the day in question. Her husband, Bernard, was looking for sex and company with two women in a Doncaster hotel. One daughter, Jess, was encountering a new lover in Blackpool while the other daughter, Ashe, was expelling her ex-partner from her home in Ulverston. Meanwhile Christine’s student son, Steven, was having a day out in Durham with his airline steward boyfriend.
Clearly Stephens is doing several things at once in this play. In the words of a haunting Jarvis Cocker song that, in a cappella form threads its way through the action, he is writing a “hymn of the north.” This is a London-based writer’s guilt-ridden love-letter to his native soil suggesting that, even in a time of economic hardship, there is much kindness and charity to be found in the northern heartlands. But Stephens’s play is also an unfashionable testament to the power of family life. It reminds me of a peripatetic version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in showing that the ties of blood transcend individual woes and that, in the end, we are all mortal.
I’d like to have heard something more specific about the north’s social problems and one or two characters, such as Ashe’s formerly drug-addicted partner, feel lightweight. But Stephens interweaves his separate stories without becoming soapily episodic and Frankcom’s production moves one by its hint that members of the family are all intuitively aware of each other even when separated by physical distance. Naomi Dawson’s design also cleverly subverts the circularity of the Royal Exchange by creating an end-stage out of a flight of steps that might have come from the movie A Matter of Life and Death; which is what this play is finally about.
The performances are good without being self-consciously starry. Manley perfectly captures Christine’s tender concern for her dispersed brood and Lloyd Hutchinson precisely conveys the sadness behind her husband’s wanly erotic adventures.
David Moorst as the anxiety-ridden Steven, Katie West as the once-suicidal Ashe and Witney White as the life-hungry Jess deliver accomplished performances. “Don’t forget your northern blood,” runs a line in the Jarvis Cocker song that underscores the action.
Stephens heeds that advice while writing a play that does something relatively rare in modern theatre: it takes an optimistic view of humanity and suggests that the nuclear family is not going to explode any time soon.
• At the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 16 November.
