Sally Cookson has a long track record of superlative adaptations of classic texts, including a number of highly-praised shows aimed at younger audiences. Here she turns her visually inventive style to an original play for all ages: Ross Willis’s tale of a boy, Sonny, whose stammer means he can barely say his own name.
Sonny (Hilson Agbangbe) is a teenage schoolboy who first bounds onto the stage accompanied by his superhero alter ego, Captain Chatter (Ciaran O’Breen). Captain Chatter is the star of Sonny’s home-made comic book, a fearless communicator imbued with the superpower of being able to make smalltalk.
This dynamic opening, energised by O’Breen’s crisp mime skills and use of visual vernacular as well as the creative captioning that accompanies the whole show, soon gives way to the truth of the matter: Sonny has dreamt up this alternative reality because he himself struggles to say a single word in class. His stammer tenses up his whole body, and it’s often easier to go through a whole day at school without speaking at all.
Fellow pupil Roshi (Naia Elliott-Spence) is his garrulous opposite. She stubbornly makes friends with Sonny despite his reluctance and brashly invites him to join her on the everyday adventures of pre-teen schoolchildren: sharing scandalous rumours about fellow pupils and poking dead things with a stick. I say this is ‘for all ages’, but there is a proliferation of quite bad swearing (not only from the pupils), so ‘young teen’ and upward is probably the target market.
The story shows us a glimpse of Sonny’s journey through a school system that hasn’t the time to get to know him or support his passion for art and how his struggles to communicate leave him isolated, tense with anger and even starving as he can’t bring himself to try speaking with the dinner lady.
Agbangbe makes a strong professional debut in the title role, using every muscle and shape of his physicality to convey the frustration, breathlessness and self-flagellation of experiencing a stammer. The duo of Agbangbe and Elliot-Spence is a delightful one. Elliot-Spence is also making her debut here, and these assured, winning performances from both surely foretell great things to come.
The ensemble is rounded out by a strong trio. I’ve already mentioned the wiry-framed physical expressivity of the excellent O’Breen. On the night I saw it, Meg Matthews stepped into the dual role of a sympathetic mother figure and the demented headteacher Mrs Fish. And Eva Scott plays the teacher who finally forms a bond with Sonny, standing up to the school’s insistence on behavioural improvement forms and punitive detentions.
Scott had impressed previously in a number of shows at Leeds Playhouse, and she’s on superb form again here: playing with humour and lightness of touch, while also getting to let loose in a bonkers sequence where Sonny’s small role in a school production of Hamlet becomes an operatic gun battle with neon incarnations of the bard himself.
Matthews, too, is delightful, embodying both the batty, imposing headteacher and the dream vision of Sonny’s mother as he thinks back to perfect past moments with her.
The script is packed with humour, and things move at a decent pace, helped also by the excellent ensemble and direction. At times, it does feel as though there are some loose ends left dangling; structurally, I was occasionally unsure where we were heading, and a few big late-stage reveals end up unresolved—the consequences of some of the characters’ actions would surely be more major than we see here. I also felt the comic-book conceit got dropped relatively early on, and the focus shifted to Sonny’s tussles with the idea of standing up in public and speaking his lines. His love of art gets left by the sidelines in the story, though it does inform the style of the design and projections throughout.
But the world created, and the way it is invoked, is wonderful. Cookson brings her characteristic visual and physical imagination and ease to the staging. And the design is wonderful—uncluttered, clear and imaginative. Katie Sykes’s set and costume evoke the comic book world of Sonny’s imagination lightly and provides a flexible playing space for the action. Aideen Malone’s lighting uses vivid neons and picks out key moments effectively. Tom Newell’s captioning crosses over with video design, using fonts, colour and effects to contribute to the storytelling.
Lastly, the sound design (Jonathan Everett) and score by Benji Bower also add a great deal. Propulsive and shaped around off-beat samples, using breath and snatches of words, the original compositions weave into the fabric of the story excellently and create a dynamic and energising backdrop for the action that unfolds.
In a play about the frustration of being unable to communicate, the design, staging and performances all come together to convey the sensation of a rich inner world, trapped inside but bursting to escape.