Stage-to-screen review: Lights Up - Sitting

Future Dame Katherine Parkinson's Sitting was staged at the Arcola two years ago. Although the credits acknowledge that it's based on Sarah Bedi's original production, and keeps one of the original cast members in Mark Weinman, this film for the BBC's Lights Up strand is a new production from Jeremy Herrin, with the playwright now also taking on one of the roles: Parkinson plays Mary, a recently-divorced mother of one with some unresolved feelings about her dead sister. Luke (Weinman) is unemployed and soon to be a father; though he keeps insisting he hates his pregnant wife, the way he talks about her suggests otherwise. Cassandra (Alex Jarrett) is an aspiring actress and seemingly a compulsive liar. Their monologues are interspersed with each other, each of them speaking to an artist, John (briefly seen played by Paul Jesson,) who's painting their portraits.

Like all the plays chosen for the season I hadn't seen Sitting on stage, but it's a perfect play to transition to TV and feels right at home there: Having the characters speak to the mostly-unseen, always silent John makes the straight-to-camera monologues feel a bit more naturalistic than they usually do.

And being able to cut quickly between the characters, or have two or all three of them appear in split screen, feeds into the way Parkinson tells her overall story: In small, funny touches (you can see some of her comic timing as an actor being useful in her writing as well,) we start to get character studies of the three, as Mary reveals she has feelings for the artist, Cassandra may have an ulterior motive for sitting for him, and Luke nervously eats and drinks his way through the props, mirroring his nervousness at becoming a father when he never knew his own.

But the trio are also linked by more than just the jaffa cakes they nibble on, and as it becomes apparent that the three portraits might be much further apart in time than they first appear, the structure and the way they're connected to each other - and to John - starts to come together. I did think that Parkinson slightly over-explains this at the end; the puzzle pieces had been slotting together nicely enough. And you could probably argue that the story's a bit sentimental, but it worked well enough for me, moving me as much by the end as it made me laugh along the way.

Portraits painted for the film by Roxana Halls

Sitting by Katherine Parkinson is streaming on BBC iPlayer until April 2022 as part of the Lights Up season.

Running time: 1 hour.

Photo credit: Avalon / David Monteith