Writer: David Alade
Director: Suzann McLean
A father dies: a good father, one who worked hard, cared for his family, was in touch with his emotions and guided his children through life. Sunny Side Up was a smash hit at the Peckham Fringe in 2022 and is dedicated to Sunny Alade, nicknamed Sunny, who died six years ago. His son, David Alade, has written a tribute to his wisdom and love. “All this you hear, it really happened” Alade reminds us, who from the opening scene, where he receives voice messages of condolences, has the audience eating from his hand.
Sunny Side Up is an everyday story of inner-city London that shows us with every turn and scene that truth can be stranger, crueller, more beautiful and poetic, than fiction. David Alade grows up on a Peckham Estate. As a kid, he looks like “a Malteser” because that’s the only haircut Sunny can do.
This a Christian home that instils ideas of good and bad, right, and wrong and the themes of sunny and shade, light and dark run throughout the piece, from the protected innocence of a loved and cared for little boy to the rude awakening of adolescence and harsh reality of shadowy places, local gangs, knives, and urban violence.
The play touches on themes of immigration, inner-city life, masculinity, the daily struggles of a Black British, working-class family, education, social mobility, and gentrification. Alade uses his considerable abilities to embody an entire cast of individuals, not least his father, as well as his different selves from L’il D, cute, awkward, cry baby to the teenage pent-up brawler, minor dealer, and young scholar getting his head around theories of performativity. We travel chronologically through milestones: primary and secondary school, gangs, university, and work, as fragments of memory, occasion and emotion come alive on the stage through a single body with heart and passion.
Produced by Theatre Peckham, Sunny Side Up is technically seamless. Alade appears as if in a dream surrounded by billows of dry ice as we journey on this reverie told with laughter, heart, and soul. The superb use of sound and music creates an audio narrative of its own as we move from the home to school, church to nightclub and is mirrored by Tim Speechley’s evocative lighting which takes the audience from one memory to another as we relive the highs, lows, good, bad, and ugly. The authentic vernacular of the street and estate is riven with glittering lines of poetry that sparkle in the grit. Don’t miss this honest, powerful, and moving show which is storytelling at its finest. There can’t be many better ways to spend an hour.
Runs until 1 June 2024
