Review: Five Characters in Search of a Good Night's Sleep

Five Characters in Search of a Good Night's Sleep was devised and written by the company for ViSIBLE Theatre Ensemble and first performed at the Southwark Playhouse in April 2022. ViSIBLE is committed to creating performances that look at later life and living longer from a different point of view. One of its key aims is to work collaboratively, using the talent of Britain's experienced older actors to tell the stories of a population living 30 years longer than a century ago.

The play was developed over two years through a series of workshops in response to the statistic that 30 per cent of the UK population suffer from some type of sleep disturbance. It follows a group of five insomniacs as they try to make it through the night telling the audience about their futures and pasts, their distracting activities and sleep techniques.

Although they are on stage at the same time, the characters don't interact with each other, telling their own stories in their own stage space as they struggle through the night. The characters offer an interesting mix of different experiences that offer up many opportunities for discussion.

This doesn't feel like a play that would work hugely well for a staged performance in school, but they are many ideas and techniques that would be interesting to explore in the classroom. The characters shift between first and third-person speech, which could be a useful way for students to explore character and their understanding of objectives.

Some of the characters’ stories would be excellent starting points for devised work. I'd be intrigued to see where students would take Terry's story about her very elderly mother and the difficulty of caring for her or to explore the death of her daughter Zoe. There are also sections of the text that would work well for monologue exploration to add diversity to the type of texts that are used in the classroom.

Overall, it wouldn't be my first choice for a secondary school text but there is a lot to explore that would lead students down an interesting path.