This Wide Night

Green Light Theatre’s This Wide Night is a tender and compelling two-hander about the friendship of two ex-convicts. Lorraine (Sancia Robinson), arrives at the one-room apartment of Marie (Claire Sara), having just been released from prison. From the start, the relationship is shaped by a sizzling contrast: Robinson plays Lorraine with the frenetic energy of someone used to watching her back, while Marie deals with the indignities of ex-con life with bleak humour and an unattached, casual air. It’s that odd contrast between restless middle-aged and weary youth (Lorraine is 50, Marie is 30) that gives way to a conflict between two visions of hope: Marie seems resigned, but Lorraine is possessed by a real conviction that things can improve for both of them. 

Both performances are inexhaustibly absorbing — director Elias Jamieson Brown’s work here is excellent — which is accentuated by Marie’s cramped bedsit, aided by the small space of The Burrow. There is a persistent sense that the play is obscuring important details, and the manner in which they are revealed is occasionally graceless: a particular detail about Lorraine’s past, and how she wound up in prison, is given and then never discussed again. 

The play is mesmerising in its authenticity (the play was written after its author’s time in a women’s prison). It doesn’t gloss over the lives of its characters, it draws out real moments of joy which are deeply affecting in their indictment of the prison system. Both women struggle with work and isolation: there’s the bracing suggestion that Marie and Lorraine only allow themselves to be locked into one another’s lives because there’s nobody else. At once simple in its execution and complex at its core, This Wide Night is a testament to the power of theatre not as a vehicle for sympathy from above, but engagement in the lives of others.