Creation & Direction: Northern Rascals
Playwright: Anna Holmes
In a rainy Yorkshire town in that part of God’s Own Country now known as the “Happy Valley” (thanks, Sally Wainwright), 18-year-old K is anything but. His day consists of getting up, dressing in a high-vis jacket, going to work, coming home and crawling into bed before starting the same routine once more.
On the face of it, Northern Rascals’ dance theatre piece is an exploration of young male mental health in a world where gentrification, such as in K’s home town, is leaving so many behind. Trapped in his Kafkaesque loop of wake, work, sleep and plagued by a persistent offstage clamour of raised but muffled voices, Soul Roberts’s K is clearly tormented.
Early on, though, we get enough about the mundanity of K’s repetitive life that the persistent loop brings diminishing returns. Things improve massively when K’s oldest friend Danny (Ed Mitchell) returns from university. There is an ease between the two young men, so unguarded, unfiltered, and unapologetically free of boundaries that it is hard to pin a label on their relationship purely through their dance. They could be brothers, lovers, or something in between. One thing is for sure: Danny is moving on, while K is stuck.
That relationship acts as a metaphor for all the themes of the piece. Towns such as Hebden Bridge are embracing gentrification, which brings income into the area at the cost of reinforcing class and social strata: parts of the town move on and move up, pushing long-established families further into poverty and misery. As K joins Danny on a visit to his friend’s Manchester student life, the divide between the two, even after only months apart, is evident. Even when Danny struggles to envisage a world where his new friends go skiing for Christmas, he feels more relaxed and settled around these unseen students than with the brash, whirling dynamo of his former best friend.
The sequences between Roberts and Mitchell are Sunny Side’s strongest moments, the two boys oscillating between rekindling the joys of their former friendship (occasionally joined by Sophie Thomas, taking on several everywoman roles throughout the piece). The boisterous plasticity of Mitchell’s movement contrasts effectively with Roberts’s more animalistic, ferocious dance, a rage against being ignored and left behind.
Anna Holmes’s script, elevated poetic forms intoned over the dance sequences, both informs and obscures the story being told through dance. Coupled with an overly amplified score by composer Wilfred Kimber and sound effects, from rain to shouting to phone alarm clocks, that persist long after their point has been made, the cacophonous medley often feels at odds with the delicacy of the story being told.
The climax of the piece comes as Danny and K wrestle and release in a mess of fighting, loving, grieving, losing, rescuing. Their friendship is complex and ever-shifting, the choreography tells us. And for K, it may not be enough.
There is a pallor of death, both metaphorical and literal, casting its shadow over the whole piece. The conclusion, in which Kimber’s orchestral sounds continue over an empty, darkened stage, allows us to contemplate what the end of K’s story may become. Until then, though, there are too many sequences that neither propel nor enlighten his and Danny’s tale. As a taut 60 minutes, Sunny Side would feel like an evisceration of lives left behind; at nearly 90, its power is dramatically curtailed.
Reviewed on 8 April 2025 and continues to tour
The Reviews Hub Score
Kafkaesque vision of young male mental health
