Sun Bear – Park Theatre, London

A darkly comic monologue, Sarah Richardson’s Sun Bear is a reminder that perspective is everything. One person’s c-word might be someone else’s survivor, supporter or friend.

Content warning: contains discussion of abusive relationships.  Resources for anyone affected can be found here.

Sun Bear

A sun bear, so the freesheet tells us, is “a small bear with a light coloured sun shaped mark on their chest.  Despite their small and disarming appearance they are very aggressive bears, probably the most aggressive, and will attack without being provoked.”  But is it really as simple as that?  Perhaps the sun bear has its reasons.  Perhaps it has an office job, and can’t take one more person asking it for a pen to write down the communal lunch order, for instance?

Meet Katy.  It’s actually her who has the office job.  With the annoying colleagues who love cheesy metaphors about togetherness and order their lunches as a group.  We meet Katy on a bad day.  First, Pennie asks her to join a double date. As if.  Then there’s Sharon, who just won’t stop interfering.  And the pens, of course.  Katy is doing her best to keep calm, but there is a rage inside her that will not stay quiet for much longer.  It’s only as Katy talks to us over the course of an hour that we start to understand just what has provoked these seemingly unprovoked outbursts.  How there can be so much more to a situation than meets the eye.

Sarah Richardson wrote Sun Bear, and plays the part of Katy.  The world of office politics might not be familiar to her, but the difficulty of putting a life back together after a ‘difficult break-up’ (here a euphemism for an abusive relationship) is.  I toyed with using a word like ‘unfortunately’ or ‘sadly’ there but didn’t, for the reason that I admire immensely anyone with the fortitude to overcome the control of an abusive partner, whether emotional, physical or financial (or often all at once). And to channel those experiences into something which may give others comfort, solace, or pause for thought, even more so.

Healing is not Always a Linear Thing

So this is a subject close to home for Richardson.  Undoubtedly why the character of Katy rings so true, as she tells her story with dark humour and a refusal to accept pity or sympathy.  Sun Bear asks uncomfortable questions about our duty to each other: whether to wait for a request for help from someone who may not be able to make one. Whether a personal struggle justifies lashing out at well-meaning but misguided attempts at support.  How to let people in when keeping everything contained and under control has been your defence mechanism. It certainly puts those niggling office annoyances into perspective.

Katy is a well-written character. She has the audience’s sympathy even as her outbursts become more unreasonable, and we are almost willing her to take one of the proffered olive branches by the end of the hour, before they are snatched away for good. I did find some of the repetitions a little too repetitive by the end, but I liked the sequences of poetic language: a nice counterpoint to the wry humour and the mundanity of office life.

Sun Bear is on at Park Theatre as part of a double bill of short works, Make Mine a Double.  You can choose one or both: I saw only Sun Bear but could also have seen The Light House by Alys Williams.  An interesting way to compare and contrast shorter theatrical works and make a proper evening of them. There’s a discount if you buy tickets for these works on the same or consecutive days.

As for Sun Bear, if it leaves open some of the questions it poses, I hope it makes me quicker to remember that we never really know what someone else has going on.  One person’s c-word is another person’s survivor, to put it another way.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3.5/5

Sun Bear on as part of Make Mine a Double until 13 April.  More info and tickets here.