That Darren Haywood’s a clever old thing. Not content with being a crackingly good actor himself, it turns out he’s now written a really good play. And directed it. Oh, and did I forget to say he set up the festival it features in, Birmingham Fest, a brand new city-wide performing arts festival celebrating the city’s venues and its arts scene. And some people think they’re busy.
Sundown turns out to be a fiendishly clever two-hander developed under the auspices of a Birmingham Rep creative-writing programme. Its plot is deceptively simple. A young woman, Lara, arrives at a famous beauty spot, Beachy Head, to watch the sun go down in solitary contemplation. But she’s hardly got settled before she’s joined by another beauty lover, Kris, who interrupts her chosen solitude and even wants to chat.
Lara’s a bit posh, a barrister, rather superior and certainly judgemental, especially of a loser like Kris who’s given up on college, walked out of his going-nowhere job in a betting office and is now doing what looks like a very poor job of chatting her up.
But if the set-up’s simple, it gives no idea of the subtlety and depth of nuanced meaning in this wonderful little play which announces that in Darren Haywood we have a new writer of considerable power. Because both of these damaged people have come to the famous beauty spot in the blackest despair, thoughts of suicide on their tortured minds. And as the sun sets, two damaged people are laid bare and we truly see deep into their despairing souls.
Never forced, never overdone, never sentimental, this short play ends fittingly without conclusion as the sun sets on them both, possibly for good.
Benjamin Thorne, a 2012 graduate of Birmingham Theatre school is almost uncannily convincing as the ill-at-ease young college drop-out Kris whose lack of direction somehow sums up a whole generation which finds scaling the financial cliff of present-day Britain too much to bear.
I’ve seen Emily Summers before, and she was very good, but as Lara she does something special, almost unique, in that she shows us a potentially tragic figure saddled by their own limitations, bouncing our reactions back at us from the emotional limitations of this unattractive, self-pitying character who is nevertheless human and maybe deserves a break.
Crikey. Bring it on guys. More, please, more.
