Let Loose Sid

May 28, 2024

28th May – 8th June 2024

Superheroes, call centres, domestic violence, chimpanzees… add homelessness, lucid dreaming, and suicide to the list and you get close to covering the dizzying array of subjects incorporated into Let Loose Sid, now showing at Baron’s Court Theatre. If the list sounds like a recipe for sheer incoherence, not least for a one-hour, one-hander in a small theatre tucked away beneath a pub in West London, Broken God’s production will show you otherwise. This is smart, captivating, thought-provoking theatre.

Written and directed by Calum McArthur, Let Loose Sid tells the story of a troubled twenty-one-year-old dealing with childhood trauma, the loss of their father (the individual responsible for much of that trauma), and a mother in a coma in hospital. When not struggling through a day’s work in their soul-destroying job as a telemarketer, Sid, portrayed in an assured and convincing performance by Louis Walwyn, talks to the superhero action figures from their childhood, suffers nightmares, wets the bed, and early in the play finds what they discover is the dream journal of their mother. Sid soon realises the journal was a tool for their mother’s practice of lucid dreaming—the ability to be conscious in one’s dreams, influence the narrative of those dreams, and potentially influence events in the waking world too—and decides that they too want to learn how to dream lucidly.

With the assistance of simple yet highly effective set, sound, and lighting design, Walwyn adroitly shifts roles between characters in the plot. At one moment we are with Sid as themself, the next we are in the dream world of their mother, the next Walwyn acts out both sides of dialogues between Sid and their father or Sid and their boss. If there are one or two places where this often rapid-fire shape-shifting teeters on the edge of comprehensibility, Walwyn soon pulls things back to sense. Ultimately, he gives a powerful and at times heartbreaking account of trauma, memory, and the condition we all must bear: that of living with ourselves and our past. In one particularly moving scene, we see Sid’s elation when they first achieve dream lucidity. Under orange light, Walwyn moves around the stage manipulating space with his arms and body: think of tai chi in the clouds at sunset. It’s exquisitely done.

“Let Loose Sid achieves the rare feat of addressing a serious topic (in fact, a range of serious topics) with grace, creativity, and humour.”

The centrality of the dream world introduces questions of psychoanalysis, and we can wonder whether Sid would benefit from treatment themself (if they could afford it, which they can’t). At one point, Sid comments on how boring it can be when other people recount their dreams to you. True as this may be in day-to-day life, for Freud, the godfather of psychoanalysis, dream interpretation was central to addressing trauma and psychosis. Questions of sexuality and gender were important to Freud too, and Let Loose Sid addresses these issues with the lightest of touches. We learn of Sid’s pronouns through the play’s promotional material and at one point, when imagining a conversation between action figures of Spiderman and The Hulk, an erotic encounter between the two superheroes begins to play out. The moment ends abruptly as Sid is suddenly overcome with self-consciousness and embarrassment. In lesser hands, the scene would be clunky and puerile, but McArthur’s script and Walwyn’s performance are, in this regard, pitch-perfect.

Let Loose Sid achieves the rare feat of addressing a serious topic (in fact, a range of serious topics) with grace, creativity, and humour. It invites us to consider the importance of its themes but never preaches or judges. It entertains too, as theatre should. At the end of the play, Walwyn signalled for the audience to cut short our applause so he could tell us about James’ Place, a charity that offers free, life-saving treatment to suicidal men in Liverpool, London, and Newcastle. It was an important message, gratefully received.