REVIEW: NIGHT LIGHT by Tom Chandler and Maeve O’Haire At Upstairs at the Gatehouse 6 - 10 June 2023

‘warm and funny and real and human’★★★★

Oh, how refreshing it is, from time to time, to stumble across a show that isn’t trying to be meaningful or relevant or to impress with its lived experience or earnest relatability as it just gets on with the jolly business of making you laugh at four human beings living their lives. And how refreshing, too, that such a show has more to say about people and the dreams they dream and the lives the live than any number of workshopped performance pieces in which theatre makers drill deep down into life without actually giving much of a damn about it or apparently having met another human.

Three flatmates, all mid-20s, drifting along while they decide what to do with their lives. One disruptive element in a ‘posh’ girlfriend for one of them whose struggle’s consisted of swapping one pony for the next. We’re in a tip of a north London flat (the stage manager must wake screaming in the wee dark hours at the thought of re-setting it) where Irish childhood friends Rian (Tom Chandler) and Robyn (Maeve O’Haire) put up with English would-be writer Randy (Tom Inman) because they need his share of the rent. 

Nothing much happens in a thoroughly amiable 70 minutes – Robyn has given up her job to be a cheerleader (who can’t do the splits), Randy has writers’ block, Rian is about to find out he’s going to be the father he hasn’t planned yet on giving up his extended childhood to be. And it’s warm and funny and real and human, catching three moderately arrested adolescents on the cusp of their adulthood, the moment when they’ll finally break into work and houses and marriage and jobs and when the undying closeness of their friendship here will begin to slip into an Elysian past.

Chandler and O’Haire developed the piece between them, not originally as a play, but in what’s turned into a well-crafted series of inconsequential scenes that make a whole as strong as the sum of its often very funny parts, and their close working relationship shows in their comfort and chemistry.  All four performances are good (Lydia Hopgood fills out the cast as a pleasingly self-satisfied girlfriend for Rian, whom she knows so well and loves and understands so much she can’t stop calling him Ryan), and the energy doesn’t lag for a moment in a carefully choreographed piece where those who shouldn’t be on stage to overhear things are artfully deployed elsewhere and in which the pleasures and frustrations of enforced living in a small flat are explored with real wit and knowledge.

No-one ever moans a show’s too short; Night Light nearly earns that grumble.

Photography: Rory McLaughlin

NIGHT LIGHT by Tom Chandler and Maeve O’Haire

Director: Tom Chandler

Presented by Giggle Riot Theatre

Upstairs at the Gatehouse, Highgate 6 - 10 June 2023

Box Office: https://upstairsatthegatehouse.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/1173641961

Reviewer: David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Better Together (Jack Studio, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.