As Jim Nolan’s wonderful uplifting play Brighton got another well deserved standing ovation at Garter Lane prior to embarking on a national tour I was moved by its ordinary extraordinary energy and powerful affirmation of the beauty that is the gift, the thread of life and the defiance against an unexpected if inevitable future.
This play celebrates the small triumph of a frail person taking seventeen minutes to go from the Cavalry Hospital to a tube station, a place “not a destination of choice” and an equally small triumph of learning to love, again, to start to hope again, to start up a choir for Christmas, to believe Fulham could and would beat Arsenal. It is liberating in the shadow of despair and possible suicide on the road from which no traveller should return but by the end, it takes the ordinary story of three people and becomes a major belief in miracles and human support and comfort.
