Light Falls - REX Manchester

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.