Writer: Lydia Sabatini
Director: Lata Nobes
Lydia Sabatini’s The Light Trail was shortlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Playwriting. In this moving and subtle production at the Hope Theatre, directed with confident assurance by Lata Nobes, you can see why. The play lobs a hand grenade of incipient teen psychosis into in a family that is already struggling to cope with a grandparent’s dementia, maternal alcoholism, a failing marriage, and engrained cultural homophobia. It is a heady mix, one that might see characters and narrative splinter off in a dozen different directions. In fact, although the work sometimes feels more stylistically akin to a novel than a play, the production comes together very nearly flawlessly.
Ellie (Heather Campbell-Ferguson oozing cocksure teen charm) is a soccer-addicted 17-year-old with a Saturday job at Sports Direct, a coveted place on the Essex under-18s girls’ team, and a yearning to become a physiotherapist. Her cautious goal-celebrating flirtation with teammate Jas (a brooding Sophia Decaro who constantly casts her eyes skyward in an apparent search for celestial contact) sees the two hook up at a party. The duo embarks on a fiery teen romance. But the blossoming love story hits a boulder in the road in the form of Jas’s firm belief she has been chosen by God to head-up Google and solve the enduring conflict between Palestine and Israel.
Struggling to cope with her girlfriend’s increasingly psychotic delusions of grandeur, Ellie approaches Jas’ defensive, homophobic elder sister Priya (Nusrath Tapadar whose fixed grin and jittery expression communicates a constant state of supressed anger) for help. With a bundle of her own worries to deal with and none too impressed with the couple’s budding liaison, Priya, torn between a career in law and creative writing, does not immediately turn out to be a supportive sibling. The increasingly urgent question is will Jas get the help she needs, and what impact will her illness have on those who love her?
Sabatini structures the piece as three alternating monologues, each narrating happenings from the point of view of one of the woman. These are intercut with snatches of dialogue between the three, and with those around them: parents, medical professionals, friends, and extended families. It is a first-person structure that is more obviously literary than theatrical, and it demands the audience work hard to figure out what is going on (and who is telling the truth). But as a mechanism for communicating the idea that mental illness impacts family and lovers every bit as much as the sufferer, it is highly effective.
Nobes’ zippy and focussed direction, with characters sharing lines and constantly changing place, helps keeps momentum flowing, as does a storyline packed with twists and turns. Sorcha Corcoran’s set design, a kind of small swimming pool decorated with the powered colours of the India Holi festival, conveys the feeling of being confined inside a mind that, though full of light, shade, and joy, is just not working properly.
The Light Trail never patronises its protagonists or lets them off the hook for poor choices. Jas, who wears the burden of her schizophrenia diagnosis like a bitter, black, shroud, can be selfish and manipulative. Priya and Ellie both, in their own ways, let her down. But flawed as they are, and in Priya’s case out-and-out homophobic, these are three individuals manifestly doing the best they possibly can for themselves and the people they love. The storyline is raw, real, and believable because, like life, unfolding events demand a response from these women they are ill-equipped to give. We cannot help but empathise with them, imperfect and maddeningly inconsistent as they are.
Sabatini’s writing is tight and packed with tension, but also manifests a deft touch with characterisation. Priya summarises her wine-guzzling and resentful mother with magnificent economy as someone who can “slam a door open”. Ghosted by her girlfriend and seemingly abandoned by a sister who cannot cope, a heart-broken Jas talks of the “feeling of all the love in the world being withdrawn from everywhere, all at once.” Occasionally some broad comedy slips in (Elly’s numerous party shots of vodka leave her, in her words, well and truly “Boris Johnsoned”). Though the ending (no spoilers here) feels like wishful thinking, in the main this is a serious, thought-provoking, and engrossing exploration of living with mental illness. It demands an audience.
Runs until 26 November 2022
The Reviews Hub Score
Powerful
