Lights Out

Sunday 04 February - By Charlotte Cannell for The Student

‘Lights Out’ took to Bedlam’s stage last Friday night to portray a witty, yet painfully authentic conversation between sisters, shadowed by the foggy presence of untreated childhood wounds.

The cast of two brought life to a clever script, filled with the all-too-familiar petty discourse and tense silences of a distanced sibling relationship that isn’t as it once was. Audiences were greeted with a stage littered with moving boxes amidst a standalone armchair, the sisters alternately sitting on either to mirror their ever-switching levels of openness and maturity throughout the exchange. A few missed beats and line delays did not stop the production from thoroughly entertaining its audience. From comedic clashes over fruit salad and mission impossible vs mean girls, to confronting vs ignoring darker elements of their shared past, bedlam was filled with laughter and silence as the narrative unfolded.

As the play progressed the two sisters sat on the floor together, levelling with theatregoers and enveloping the audience in their awkward discussions of each other’s increasingly alien personal lives. The people behind ‘Lights Out’ transformed Bedlam into a half-unpacked flat, filled with intimate conversation that the audience themselves seemed part of. Writer and director Rae Webb created a script that skilfully expanded a light-hearted and funny everyday conversation to an emotion-packed confrontation of shared and repressed past trauma and how reactions shape the moral perception of an event. Both actors talentedly portrayed a strained and polarised sisterly bond, a highlight being the deeply emotionally illustrative voice work whilst the charged ‘lights out’ moment took hold of the stage.

Each creative decision behind Bedfest’s ‘Lights Out’ felt meaningful, urging onlookers to re-examine their own familial relationships and head into the future with enough hope and strength to confront the past (or let it rest).