Seeing the Lights (Theatre by the Lake, Keswick)

Brendan Murray’s Seeing the Lights, centres on a birthday and a deathbed.

Mum is not well, and son Terry looks after her, with help on odd jobs from electrician Ray. As her birthday approaches, Mum becomes more convinced that her son Kenneth is going to visit from Australia. Instead, she gets her daughter Muna, who normally lives away running a clothing business with husband Nasir.

When Muna learns that Ray is Terry’s lover, she throws him out midway through wiring a light switch. Nasir botches the job, and Mum is electrocuted. As her health fails still further, she talks of her desire to see the Blackpool lights one last time; what actually happens provides one of the most moving moments in a theatre you are likely to see for a long time. Along the way, the family bicker and banter, accuse and forgive, and their rooted yet still-evolving relationships are revealed with a humour and understanding which keeps things the right side of sentimentality.

Anna Pilcher Dunn’s set, in its meticulous detail and cramped spaces, shows just how the world of the cared-for shrinks – there are no wide open spaces or symbolic touches here. The centre of the play lies in the relationship between Terry and Mum, and director Stefan Escreet ensures that heartache is often peeping out beneath their sharp exchanges.

James Duke’s performance as carer Terry is a study in world-weary camp, pitched perfectly for Murray’s sharply witty insights. Laura Cox’s Mum has to take a back seat out of earshot whilst some of the play’s revelations work themselves out, but her time in the spotlight before her accident is marked by a spiky vitality. Rebecca Todd’s Muna is for much of the play a disturbingly angry presence, sometimes shading into playing the schoolmistress with the less uptight characters.

While this is often very funny, it does mean that the justification for her anger revealed later in the play feels like a sudden change of direction into three dimensionality. Muna is balanced by two more benevolent characters, Chris Hannon’s Ray and Alan Suri’s Nasir. Suri brings a gormless charm to the bungling Nasir, while Hannon contributes a genial unruffledness to the sometimes frenetic family atmosphere.

Though it occasionally becomes weighed down with exposition, this is a funny and moving play showing with some delicacy of touch situations and exchanges its audience will recognise immediately.

Seeing the Lights runs at the Theatre By the Lake until 7 November.