You know that feeling when something hits you right in the feels, leaving you blown away, but desperate to talk about it at the same time? That’s Sunny Side by Northern Rascals. Contemporary dance meets spoken word in this raw, beautiful exploration of men’s mental health: where pain, loneliness, and frustration spill out through movement and poetry. It’s powerful stuff: quietly devastating, yet hopeful. If you’ve ever struggled to find the right words, this show speaks volumes.
Credited as co-artistic directors, Anna Holmes’ striking poetry and Sam Ford’s sublime choreography combine brilliantly to portray the daily struggles that define life for so many. At the heart of it all is K, played with incredible honesty by Soul Roberts. K is 18, from rural Yorkshire, and stuck in the monotony of everyday life. The spoken word acts as K’s inner voice throughout the piece: sometimes reflecting his deepest thoughts, sometimes letting us glimpse the words he can never say out loud. He lives in a sparse, unimportant room; just a place to sleep, a visual metaphor for the emptiness he feels. The set, beautifully designed by Caitlin Mawhinney, for most of the performance is K’s bedroom. It looks like a room cut roughly out of a building, with wire and steel sticking out of the concrete walls, perfectly reflecting his fractured emotional state.
Soul Roberts’ portrayal of K is restrained, exactly as the character is, but when the cracks show, his performance becomes raw and deeply moving. At times he struggles physically, crawling across the bedroom floor like a newborn giraffe, beautifully symbolising his internal struggle against the overwhelming weight of expectation and loneliness.
Danny (Ed Mitchell) is K’s friend who’s gone off to university and returned, seemingly from a completely different world. Their friendship is beautifully awkward, tense with unspoken feelings. It’s never explicitly said, but you sense K’s deeper feelings for Danny, feelings he can’t express safely. Their interactions, especially the dance while gaming, brilliantly depict emotional and physical distance, dancing around each other in every sense.
A night out in London, shown through a stunning sequence with club music and laser lighting, perfectly captures that sense of feeling trapped together yet apart, third-wheeling, while your friend seems to effortlessly blend into a new social group. Sophie Thomas dances the female characters, bringing warmth and complexity to each fleeting interaction, highlighting K’s alienation even more poignantly.
One haunting image from Sunny Side stayed with me: silhouettes of parents constantly arguing behind a door, a shadowy reminder of the broken communication K has grown up with. This resonated deeply with me personally; my own parents divorced when I was nine, and I vividly recall shouted arguments on the other side of a glass door, with no one to discuss it with. It was almost as if we had to pretend it wasn’t happening. It’s this lack of emotional openness, especially among men, that the show highlights powerfully. Produced in association with Andy’s Man Club, a charity dedicated to getting men to open up, the message is clear and vital.
As someone with ADHD, who has spent years working through mental health struggles in therapy, this show especially resonated with me. I’m passionate about advocating for people to talk about what’s really going on underneath. Therapy has been a huge support for me, and Sunny Side is a raw, vital reminder of how much we need spaces where men, especially, are encouraged to talk, feel, and be heard.
Walking out of the theatre, I felt quietly emotional, reflective, carrying a sadness but also a strong sense of connection, and optimism for what this sort of work brings to light. Sunny Side brilliantly captures how universal these struggles are, even when the details differ. It’s a reminder that beneath the surface, we’re all wrestling with something, and that talking about it, sharing it, is both difficult and essential. See this show and then talk about it. It matters. We matter. You matter.
Catch this important and moving show on tour, full dates at northernrascals.com
For further support or information about Andys Man Club, visit andysmanclub.co.uk
Words by Nick Barr
Photos by Elly Welford
