Sunny Side Up

May 29, 2024

28th May – 1st June 2024

Grief is a complex emotion. It is a wound so deep it never fully heals, and there’s often no rhyme or reason to it, as it catches you off guard.

However, David Alade has found rhyme to it by creating a beautiful, heart-wrenching one-man show in honour of Dad, Sunny, who died six years ago. I’ve no doubt the one-hour play will stay with me for a long time, and if you have the chance to go and see it between now and the 1st of June, I highly suggest you do.

Alade first debuted Sunny Side Up at Peckham Fringe Festival in 2022, an annual festival which highlights some of London’s most promising, emerging talent. After a successful first run, Sunny Side Up returned for a three-week run in 2023, and now, six years on from his Dad’s death, Alade is back with a week-long run at Soho Theatre on Dean Street.

From the get go, Alade tells us: “Everything you’re about to hear happened to me, but we won’t call him David Alade. We’ll call him lil D”.

“Sunny Side Up will make you cry, laugh, and think in equal measure”

We first meet lil D as an emotional and sweet little boy, who lives with his “dream team” family on the Acorn Estate in Peckham. His parents emigrated from Nigeria, and his Dad, Sunny, is a proud staff nurse in the NHS. His mother is a cleaner, and his brother listens to too much RnB.

For the next hour, we see lil D go from a child who spends his days playing on the estate with his friends, quickly learning where you can and can’t go, to a teenager who gets put on report as a result of his bad behaviour. However, there are two things which lil D has in his back pocket: his Dad and good grades, which see him head off to Anglia Ruskin University at the age of 18.

As his Dad’s health deteriorates, lil D is conflicted. His head was in Cambridge, dreading the ping of his family Whatsapp chat, his heart was in Peckham. As graduation quickly rolls around, lil D heads home to London and spends a lot of time with Sunny, who has been diagnosed with vascular dementia.

Alade perfectly captures the idea of life going on, at the same time as life as we know it falls apart, and the complicated emotions of frustration and regret which surround it, not only at the time but with hindsight too.

Sunny Side Up will make you cry, laugh, and think in equal measure – something that’s no small feat, and something which was definitely deserving of a standing ovation.

It is a play which is definitely worth going to see, and one I’m very glad I saw.