Five Characters in Search of a Good Night's Sleep (NHB Modern Plays)

By Mike Alfreds

Five insomniacs try to make it through the night. From dusk to dawn, they struggle with a crisis in their lives which they must resolve by morning. Increasingly conscious of their shortening futures and lengthening pasts, they fill their nights with distracting activities, desperate sleep techniques, evaluations of their lives, delusions, fears, panics and utter foolishness as they prepare to face the day.
Five Characters in Search of a Good Night's Sleep was first performed by ViSiBLE Theatre Ensemble at Southwark Playhouse, London, in 2022, in a production directed by Mike Alfreds. It was devised and written by Mike Alfreds with Sonja Linden and members of the company.
ViSiBLE is a theatre company dedicated to creating performance work that throws fresh perspectives on later life and living longer. A key aspect of its identity is creating work collaboratively, drawing on the creativity and talent of Britain's huge wealth of experienced older actors.
'A masterclass in monologue… an interesting piece of theatre that encourages you to consider the torment of insomnia' - Upper Circle
'The writing is beautifully candid… it's refreshing to see older characters portrayed in a multi-faceted way that explores existentialism and humanity rather than stereotyping and defining them by their age' - North West End UK
'A great example of storytelling, with five sound monologues' - London Theatre Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Nov 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788506120

Mike Alfreds

Mike Alfreds has been directing plays for more than fifty years. In the 1970s he founded Shared Experience, and has since worked for the National Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company and also extensively abroad. He is hugely respected within the profession. He is the author of Different Every Night (Nick Hern Books, 2007), Then What Happens? (Nick Hern Books, 2013) and What Actors Do (Nick Hern Books, 2023).

Book preview

Devised by Mike Alfreds,

Sonja Linden and the Company

FIVE CHARACTERS

IN SEARCH OF A

GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

Original Production Details

Characters

Five Characters in Search of a Good Night’s Sleep

About the Company

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Sonja Linden

Five Characters in Search of a Good Night’s Sleep was originally inspired by my own obsession with sleep, an obsession which led to a quest: every social occasion I went to, I would ask people about their sleep and out it would all pour – the agonies of not sleeping, the frustration of remedies tried and found wanting – mostly from older people, but to my surprise also from people of all ages. Sleep and sleeplessness then felt like a rich theme to explore for my theatre company ViSiBLE, which was founded to counter the invisibility experienced by many older people in our society, but also to counter their predominantly negative and stigmatised representation in the media. As an older theatre professional, I had become increasingly aware that older people were under-represented in theatre, and with almost a quarter of the UK population now aged sixty-plus, it felt imperative to see more older people in all their plurality on our stages and screens.

Amazingly, we now live thirty years longer than a century ago, and ViSiBLE seeks to celebrate this remarkable extension to our lives, whilst also reflecting the challenges that come with it. One such challenge is a vanishing ability to sleep soundly through the night. This phenomenon I discovered, through my research and meetings with sleep experts, is rooted in physiological changes that come with age, changes in our sleep/wake patterns, as well as in the actual quality of our sleep. These can be compounded by existential factors – loss of identity after retirement, death of a partner, anxiety about the future, regrets about the past. It was triggers such as these that emerged in the stories we started to collect from the actors we worked with, and which were to become the vital threads of the play.

I was both fortunate and privileged to find a collaborator in director Mike Alfreds, who shared my enthusiasm for conjuring up the world of sleep and sleeplessness on stage. And once we had unleashed the remarkable imaginations and storytelling gifts of the actors with whom we workshopped, there was no going back. The stories these talented actors created became the play you are about to read.

Mike Alfreds

In 2017, Sonja Linden, the creator of ViSiBLE Theatre Ensemble, asked me if I’d like to collaborate with her on a theatre piece about sleeplessness in later life. The idea was immensely appealing. At that time, there was a huge amount of material available on television and radio and the net about the subject, wide-ranging and full of conflicting views as to its causes and cures. Basically, the older you get, the less sleep you get. Your body clock develops a life of its own, quite different from the one you were used to! Sonja, for whom sleep has long been elusive, had done a vast amount of research into the subject.

After a while, it seemed to me that sleeplessness in itself wasn’t a particularly dramatic subject, but what happened during a sleepless night might well be. This tied in with a preoccupation that has been dogging me increasingly as my years advance: what was the drive or purpose that kept people living as their capacities became more and more reduced? Aging, after all, is a continuous series of losses. This tied in with a very important aspect of my work as a director, in technical terms, defining the super-objectives of characters (a Stanislavsky term): what is it that motivates a character to strive to lead their life in a particular way?

Most often, this is not conscious on the part of the character in question, but deeply embedded in their subconscious. I do believe that in ‘real life’ too, we all have super-objectives, though we would probably be hard put to say what they were, to be sufficiently self-analytical and self-aware to define that purpose above all others that was leading us through our lives.

Usually, these are stated in very broad terms: to lead a useful life; to be a good person; to seek justice; to live for love; to engage with life; to hide from pain; to avoid conflict; to be respected; to be in control; to look out for number one…

A sleepless night can be a long, empty space in which memories, fears, anxieties, regrets can surface at their own bidding, a period in which we have virtually no control over