Everybody has a story to tell and with Sunny Side Up, David Alade is telling his. This one man show, written and starring David, has now been extended from its original form at 2022’s Peckham Fringe into a full scale production at Theatre Peckham.
Sunny Side Up is the story of Lil D, a son of African parents who moved to London and settled in Peckham. Alade uses Lil D as a narrative tool to, in effect, tell his life story up till now. The content warnings of grief, hazing and gunshots before the show starts let you know what to expect; just a little knowledge of what life is like for thousands of young working class black boys in South London. It does not take too much imagination to guess what’s coming along the road for Lil D. Alade does allude to the fact in the show that his story is like many others. The prevalence of violence and gangs is not new ground and the wanting for more from life and to get out of their council estates still holds true.
What Alade achieves here, with the help of director Suzann McLean, is to tell his story in a refreshing and by no means trivial way. The set is a moving cage with a simple bench in the middle of it, the interplay with the cage is certainly engaging and acts as a metaphor for his environment. Highlighted with smart and poignant verse, Alade’s script is alive and punchy. There is certainly plenty of comedy in there and when Alade is multi-rolling and playing his friends and family in brief scenes, there are plenty of laughs. This certainly pulls the audience in and when grief strikes the family at the end of the show, it really is an emotional blow for everybody.
Works like Sunny Side Up are important not only for the telling of stories from working class minorities but for the fact that with support from places like Theatre Peckham, young people can get their voices heard and their works’ staged. What these smaller community theatres have in spades is authenticity. The demographic of the audiences that they can pull in are what larger theatres can only dream of and this is down to how real these voices and works are. Truly representing its community, Theatre Peckham and this production of Sunny Side Up, with its young, engaged audience is promising for the future of theatre in South London.
