The drama opens as the shifts begin for the army of night workers who keep the economy silently humming while the world sleeps. Drawing on more than a thousand hours of research, Paula B Stanic’s script circles back to gradually interconnecting characters over the course of a single night.
Produced by Zoo Co, much of its innovation comes from combining spoken dialogue with BSL. Some scenes are conveyed entirely through Sign with captions on a back screen and work brilliantly in their drama, although they cannot always be read easily or flash up too fast.
Directed by Duffy and Flo O’Mahony, the scenes take place in or around Croydon, and come in disparate snatches at first. There is a gleeful children’s sleep-over, a lone busker (Shreya M Patel), a doctor (Ace Mahbaz) performing emergency surgery and grinding overwork in a Purley parcel warehouse.
The mood dips as the night progresses: parents who tuck their children into bed through furtive phone calls and a family brought together after a loved one is seriously injured, but there is always levity alongside it. One storyline captures the trauma of a train driver (Becky Barry) who has witnessed a death, while a more comic thread features a D/deaf Uber driver (Adam Bassett) and his pick-ups.
An intensity builds around some scenarios, but at two and a half hours long it lacks the concentrated impact of a play such as Alexander Zeldin’s Beyond Caring, also set among night workers.
Stella Backman’s set design of strip lighting, ramps and graffiti evocates an urban landscape with economy. The production’s greatest achievement is in its blend of BSL and expressive movement (by Simeon Campbell) to spoken scenes. The cast excel at juggling multiple roles and quick tonal switches. The music excels too – ambient electronica sounding like another nocturnal voice.
“The weirdest stuff sticks in the mind working late,” says one character as she delivers packages. What pervades both script and score is the solitude, desolation but also, sometimes, the intimacy and flaring connections that come from working in the dead of night.
• At Stanley Arts, London, until 25 November
