It’s the labels you notice first on the set of After Sunday. Stuck to the doors of the duck-egg blue kitchen cupboards, they helpfully signal the contents within each: spices, baking trays, first aid kits. The setting is clearly educational – a food technology classroom or adult education centre, perhaps. Yet the labels on the higher cupboards, just out of reach, in Claire Winfield’s set hint at a different story. They’re labelled too, but with diagnoses. ‘Highly disturbed’ reads one cupboard, ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder’ another. Labels also adorn the edge of the raised stage, attached to boxes of case files for men we are yet to meet.
You could say that After Sunday, the debut play from the Bush Theatre Writer’s Group alum Sophia Griffin, is a show about labels on a metaphorical level too. They separate the free from the bound, prison staff from prisoners, and shape how the male characters see themselves in relation to one another. Within director Corey Campbell’s production, mundanity and mental health also exist in opposition. After all, we see the kitchen long before occupational therapist Naomi (Aimée Powell) and the members of the newly formed Caribbean cooking class she’s started enter the room.
The result is a heady production (co-produced with Belgrade Theatre) that plays with the surreal while never losing sight of the cruel reality it is situated within. From the moment Leroy (David Webber), Daniel (Darrel Bailey and Ty (Corey Weekes) walk into the kitchen and are greeted by a smiling Naomi, the kitchen is marked as a liminal space, a place of play where they can play at freedom through physical theatre while Xana’s thrumming electronic soundtrack plays and Ali Hunter’s lighting glows low.
Through scattered information, we learn that this classroom is situated within a secure hospital. All three men are serving prison sentences. Leroy, the elder statesman, rolls his eyes at being forced to make dumplings with the swaggering young Ty, with his big ideas and lack of respect for authority. New to the group is Daniel, a nervous ball of energy who has never been to class before. A fourth silver work station is reserved for their friend Vincent, who fails to show up to class and hovers above the room as a spectral presence.
The situation is severe – let’s not forget that we’re talking about men who are too mentally unwell to serve their sentence in a standard prison – but Griffin’s script is by no means free of humour or sluggish. Ty’s bravado, Leroy’s deliciously sardonic eye rolls; these heightened character traits have the audience chuckling and make the moments of darkness that are never far around the corner all the more arresting.
While the men move balletically between scenes, extending their limbs and writhing in pain, Naomi exists more in the real world. Her own story must be pieced together through snatches of one-sided meetings with her employee, their muffled disciplining and retorts jolting her like an electric shock. While stylistically engaging, this conceit places something of a barrier between the character and the audience. Because we never hear the extent of what she’s up against, Naomi’s motivations are harder to understand. After Sunday proffers the conclusion that she is as trapped in the system as they are. You can’t always argue with this, yet the script itself doesn’t fully earn that message.
Like Naomi, After Sunday is a show that is there to facilitate the male experience. This is a show about masculinity in all its forms – Black masculinity in particular. All three men experience anger, grief, anxiety, pain. They come to cooking class with ideas about who they are meant to be, and quickly find these stereotypes integrating. Griffin’s script isn’t afraid to play with these complicated depths, leading to a complex, nuanced and at times overwhelming theatrical experience. Clear-cut answers aren’t offered – the end resorts to a bleakness that has until that point evaded Campbell’s production. Still, nobody would call the conclusion untrue. This is theatre that makes you laugh, maybe even cry, but above all, think.
