WHITE SUN: a perfectly imperfect middle-class critique

Sitting in the foyer of Chapter in Cardiff, waiting for White Sun to begin, I see a man bobbing around and stretching. He will not stop moving. He has a certain nervous energy that’s actually quite infectious. When he follows us into the auditorium, I realise he’s the performer. When we begin the show, he tells us that he’s been bobbing around for 19 minutes. They have left the lights on in the auditorium and it feels like we’ve walked in between tech runs. He tells us that all this is to make us feel at ease. It doesn’t, and he knows it doesn’t.

White Sun is an exploration of privilege, expectation, and the nature of art. Will Dickie takes us through his life as an actor, his relationship with his father and his complex connection to himself in this highly experimental and intriguing piece of theatre. Part memoir-style monologue and part physical theatre, Dickie’s play is deliberately difficult – both to unpick and to watch.

Dickie is funny, charming, and charismatic. He has a vast stage presence and brilliant comic timing, and he possesses the skill to win an audience over in an instant. This is crucial to the play, because it spends an immense amount of time alienating us. Between short meditations on his family’s cotton business, his challenges with addiction and his ambition to live up to the legacy of actor David Garrick, Dickie moves raucously around the stage. His movements are chaotic, and often appear to have nothing to do with what came before.

As a critic, you begin to mentally write the review: interesting but rambling, long periods with nonsensical movement. But then he turns to the audience and asks if your mind has wandered, if you’re bored, if you’re wondering what’s going on. He smiles and he makes you laugh. The mood lifts, the play moves on, and the cycle starts again.

Will Dickie and Peader Kirk have crafted a play that is almost immune to criticism. A self-conscious rejection of perfectionism, a critique of overconsumption and the all-consuming expectations of middle-class life, White Sun is an anti-theatrical experience. Fabiola Santana’s movement direction is disordered and untidy, using Dickie’s physicality to elicit visceral and jarring responses from the audience. The narrative through-line stops and starts, taking us to many different places in Dickie’s search for meaning in a post-colonial world where he feels he has more than he should, but not enough to feel complete. That is, ultimately, how we are made to feel. This is what makes the play so striking: any critique I have also reflected the play’s greatest asset. Dickie’s piece consciously rejects convention and, in its place, offers vulnerability, connection, and wit.

Something about White Sun stays with you long after you leave the room. It poses questions and gives no answers; shimmers with humour and exhausts you with problems; feels important and tells you that it isn’t. Dickie is remarkable while being remarkably imperfect. A critique of the middle class aimed at the middle class would most often constitute a criticism, but it feels purposeful that the play’s only audience is also directly in its firing line.  

Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Thurs 28 Apr

words HARI BERROW