Devised by: Mike Alfreds, Sonja Linden and the company
Director: Mike Alfreds
Five Characters in Search of a Good Night’s Sleep is a piece devised and written by the company for ViSiBLE Theatre Ensemble which aims to make older people’s lives more visible. The five characters each deliver a monologue interwoven with those of the others. When they are not speaking, the characters display the exhausted poses of people in the grip of insomnia.
The five actors perform well and there is much of interest in their individual characters. But the fact that the characters do not interact means there is no overarching narrative arc. As the show nudges up to the two-hour mark, there is no sign of how (or when) it will all end. Admittedly there are occasional thematic links about the inevitable losses of a long life, but no extended exploration of these.
The biggest limitation of the piece is that the three male characters, Irish Hugo, ardent communist Harvey and chef with a poetic soul, Bill, for all their evident flaws, have had eventful lives. The lives of the two women, Terry and Helen, by contrast, are presented as having been severely circumscribed, almost stunted. It is surprising in a piece devised in the last couple of years to witness this strangely skewed representation of gender.
Terry, sympathetically played by Geraldine Alexander, is caring for her elderly mother, and has only her daily round of domestic tasks to think about. We learn something of her past: she had qualified as a teacher, was married and had a child who evidently died young. But this key moment of her life remains undeveloped. She longs for adventure, but no reason is given for her apparently friendless state. She is presented as psychologically in thrall to her beloved father, longing for that long-past security.
Posh Helen, with a house and garden in Hammersmith, is even more thinly drawn. She is presented as a pale version of an Alan Bennett character, all snobbish disapproval masking a terrible loneliness – a favourite Bennett trope. But no reason is given for this. She speaks of various small humiliations as a teenager, but there is nothing to explain why she might have ended up so isolated. She is at least made likeable by Sally Knyvette’s thoughtful performance.
It is no coincidence that the two of the male characters have been written by the actors themselves. Each has had a life of passion. For Harvey, played and written by Andrew Hawkins, passion takes the form of a deep commitment to exposing the inequities of Thatcherism. He’s clearly been a passionate teacher, but his rants about the education system are oddly old fashioned – can he really have still been teaching when Michael Gove was education secretary?
Bill (Vincenzio Nicoli) and Hugo (Gary Lilburn), on the other hand, have had a string of passionate love affairs. Bill is the more sensitive figure. He charts the ups and downs of his life as a chef, and evidently has the richest inner life, finding relationships with women who share his love of poetry.
Hugo, a somewhat decrepit alcoholic Irishman, reveals the improbable fact of his current relationship with a beautiful younger woman. Lilburn gives himself the starring role in a series of what comes to seem like blokeish male fantasies – the exotic Serafina who jumps up on pub tables, twirling round to reveal she is knickerless – really? While his performance is always watchable and entertaining, his self-authored monologue becomes self-indulgent, in particular the long rambling story about tracking down his father’s lover in Argentina.
Insomnia itself becomes little more than a device on which to hang the five monologues.
Runs until 21 May 2022
