“Disneyland on your doorstep…”
I should begin by saying I hate clubbing now and I’ve always hated it. Even as a teenager, at an age when you’re supposed to like it, I still hated it. I hate it with the fury of a thousand suns. I am a sucker for the ‘90s, however. For that reason, I found myself at Children of the Night, a play and multimedia experience that celebrates club culture in the ‘90s, specifically through the prism of the iconic and much-loved Doncaster nightclub, Karisma.
Upon arrival, I was horrified to find the stage set up like a club complete with a dancefloor and an actual DJ set up on a rig looking down at the crowd and doing that dancing that only DJs do. For an awful moment, I thought I was going to be expected to join in. Happily, this wasn’t the case, and instead, I was presented with an emotive and intelligent meditation on what it means to grow up in a northern pit town where “there are people that leave, and people that stay”.
Lindsay (Danielle Phillips – who also serves as creator and writer) loves Donny town centre almost as much as she loves her dad Terry (Andy Mcleod). Children of the Night is the story of Lindsay and her relationship with her hometown and with club culture. Beginning with her first night out in Karisma alongside her nerdy best friend Jen (Rosa Hesmondhalgh) and ending with the closure of Doncaster’s premier nightclub in 1999.
Phillips’s great strength here is not just her encyclopaedic knowledge of Doncaster’s various pubs and clubs, but also her knack for capturing that feeling of those first big nights out. The excitement of smoky dance floors. The anxiety of the entry queue. The realisation that things will never be this way again. Children of the Night encompasses that feeling and does so with humour and warmth.
Later, Lindsay’s downward spiral is also handled with skill and poignancy. By using DJ Don (Luke Broughton) as Lindsay’s conscience, Phillips perfectly captures the whirlwind nature and depressing repetition of too many nights on the town, utilising repeated snatches of dialogue and a circular narrative to perfection. The self-destructive doom spiral is a common trope in pop culture, but Phillips manages to present this familiar plot device in a way that feels imaginative and fresh.
The relationship between Jen and Lindsay is surprisingly touching also with Phillips and Hesmondhalgh sharing an authentic and big-hearted chemistry, not to mention the emotive subplot between Lindsay and her dad (who is admittedly written as a bit of a Yorkshire cliche). It’s not all small-town hopes and dreams either – the terrifying Doncaster AIDs outbreak of the ’90s is weaved into the story in a way that is believable and incredibly raw, and it is this section of the performance that is perhaps the most powerful.
Later, the play does stumble slightly in the third act, although Phillips’s various monologues are impassioned and compelling, by failing to offer a clear and concise message for the audience to take away. After presenting us with Lindsay’s nadir, the clumsy final missive that we must protect spaces like Karisma feels slightly confused.
Having said that, despite being very Doncaster-centric, Children of the Night deserves praise for also being so universal. Anyone old enough to look back on their teenage misadventures with wistful nostalgia will find plenty to enjoy here. This, combined with strong performances and an innovative stage show ensures that Phillips’s play will surely go down as a success.
This article was written for Doncopolitan magazine:
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