Brighton Year-Round 2025

Sunny Afternoon

Sonia Friedman Productions ATG, and Gavin Kalin Productions, with Rupert Gavin, Mallory Factor and Sayers & Sayers Productions

Genre: Adaptation, Biographical Drama, Costume, Historical, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Musical Theatre, Theatre

Venue: Theatre Royal Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

“Keith Moon just drove his Bentley into his swimming pool? What’ve you been doing?” The pressure. After nine years Ray Davies’ Kinks musical Sunny Afternoon again rocks Brighton‘s Theatre Royal with Davies’ music lyrics and story given book treatment by Joe Penhall, directed by Edward Hall, till January 3.

It’s 1964 and brothers Ray and Dave Davies  (Danny Horn and Oliver Hoare) have yoked Ray’s shrinking best friend Mick Avory (Zakarie Stokes)  and bruiser bassist Peter Quaife (Harry Curley) to an elementally unstable but fruitful partnership. It occasionally explodes and dissolves but somehow survives over thirty years though we end in 1970. Most of the cast have been in Sunny Afternoon at some point; several in the 2016 tour.

The Kinks are discovered by two toff financiers Grenville and Robert (Tam Williams, Joseph Richardson – here nine years ago) who realize Robert’s brief singer career’s is wholly upstaged when other stockbroker-belters start dancing to the belt-out Kinks. Bridget Riley black-and-white kaleidoscope dresses briefly dazzle, just one stand-out costume feature. Another’s the emerald green then cadmium red zoot suits the young stars get encased with.

The stockbrokers bring in ex-singer Larry Page (nervous fixer Alasdair Craig) and Eddie Kassner (Ben Caplan, Viennese survivor with a paternal hand and bleak backstory) and they’re perilously launched. Despite Ray’s refusing to fix his teeth, as kinked as the band’s name wished on them. Ray’s Lithuanian Bradford girlfriend Rasa (another 2016 returnee, real singer/songwriter Lisa Wright’s ethereal soprano quite magical when used) becomes after pregnancy, crisis and marriage the fifth Kink.

Davies tells his own story. Actively involved with his own hits and storyline, he and Penhall (known for Blue/Orange and The Constituent) nail this musical. It’s on a par with Tommy. It’s crucially more autobiographical, more transparent, though similarly ensuring The Kinks like The Who earn their place in the commanding quartet of British pop groups of the period, perhaps ever.

Davies identifies one thread, shared with Rasa. His older sister gave him a guitar for his thirteenth birthday and dropped dead dancing the same night. She too created songs, and that lost chord’s what Ray’s been searching for. Its ache haunts Ray’s existential exhaustion, even breakdown. Even Rasa can’t reach him there.  It’s through Penhall’s dramaturgy and subtlety though that all these strands are brought out so deftly. It frankly puts most musical biopics in the shade.

The inevitable crises – ambitious sexually-driven Dave clashing with Pete, needy Mick continuously feeling left out, always leaving, the comic denouement of their U. S, tour – all these are studded with songs literally charting the narrative, cleverly woven in.

Miriam Buether’s striking set features speaker-encrusted walls like barnacles with speakers, occasionally occluded by for instance U. S. flag-drapes during that country’s hosting of the band that got banned.

But this single space, doing service for eggbox acoustics – of teen rehearsal hatcheries – recording studios and stadia, spreads out because Adam Cooper ensures the cast dance halfway up the aisles in an immersive choreography. Beuther’s catwalk thrust prongs a similarly winning intrusion. Rick Fisher’s lightings service grungy bedsit through Waterloo sunsets and bright fame. Elliott Ware’s musical supervision treated by Matt McKenzie’s sound explodes with experiments on the opening chords of ‘You Really Got me’. It does. The audience additionally get sprayed with champagne if they’re lucky and pelted with – well go yourself and see.

After ‘You Really Got Me’ we get the more ambitious ‘All Day And All of the Night’, ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ pricking Dave and the management who get served ‘A Well-Respected Man’ too, personally-inflected social satire in ‘Dead End Street’ and several intimate duets with Rasa, like ‘Tired Of Waiting of You’ ‘Set Me Free’, and more upbeat, ‘Till the End of the Day’.

The second half features ‘Sunny Afternoon’ in a spectacular synchronicity with the 1966 World Cup final, as British flags and wild fans dance, confetti flies and everyone feels happy except of course the band themselves. The Kinks and the two men sing an elegy of a singular friendship.  Ray creates a chord especially for semi-detached Mick (Stokes fines down his persona: bluesy musician, shrinking violet) singing ‘Rock’n Roll Fantasy’ and there’s a marvellous build, piecemeal, towards the creation of ‘Waterloo Sunset’ chord by chord. Which blazes its twangy magic, with a finale after another crisis, and that subversive back-beat seducer ‘Lola’ with its processional cat-walk rhythm.

Each of the leads is both actor and extremely fine singer and musician. They really play despite the backing. Horn rivets presence first as Joe Orton lookalike then dragged anchorman always centring the musical action. This radiates in Ray’s high counter-tenor that touches a stratospheric head-to-head with any Andreas Scholl. Horn captures too Ray’s edgy Ortonesque wit, and quizzical inwardness, riven with a paralysis of doubt: so he can only talk in singing, much to Rasa’s despair, leading to one of their most touching duets, the mesmerically intimate ‘I Go To Sleep’. Another is the close-harmony a cappella rendition of farewells to the now out-of-depth stockbrokers and others, in ‘Days’, beautifully rendered. Richardson proves his voice throughout, playing dated crooner and now here, exquisitely.

Much is acted out in songs not least through Hoare’s pugnacity. Hoare excels as show-off, on-edge flamboyant guitarist. He’s as happy head-butting as butt-and-guitar-butting, indeed amp-incising to get the sounds he wants. Stokes drums himself to seismic glory. Several of the cast notably Victoria Anderson’s Gwen (also here in 2016) and Jada Langley’s Joyce, both Davies sisters and lithe catwalk-cavorting groupies play trombone: alongside Emily Whitby-Samways’ Peggy, Caplan, Richardson, and Williams. Each of the cast fixes an identity and musical performance that enhances the ensemble.

Other narrative streams collide more subversively. Deryn Edwards (yet another 2016 returnee) and Phil Corbitt do duty as anxiously supportive parents doubling elsewhere as Americans – Allen Klein’s very different brash persona is a gift of contrast for Corbitt, almost unbelievably the same actor. Gregory Piven (James Chisholm) is the union rights teamster from hell.

Penhall’s book is outstanding. His wit and deft charactering of core band and satellites who interact with the complexity of a play, the way the songs move the narrative and are given believable geneses, no matter how they actually arrived; which might often not be far away from what’s presented here. There’s outstandingly snaky choreography and stage business of moving cast on and off stage into the aisles, and the way these act in character even when fading upstairs through one of the theatre boxes. Most of all the musician-actors themselves, in character, comic, vulnerable, and immensely convincing as if they’d been taken over by The Kinks themselves.

This outstanding musical deserved its awards – and brings back The Kinks forever sharing the peak of British pop with The Who, The Stones and pre-eminently The Beatles. Director Hall is just at an apex where collaborative fusion between creatives has to boil at the right temperature; as one Davies said of another. There’s no doubt this tour is as outstanding as any previous production; and if memory serves, even finer.

Casting Director Natali Gallagher CDG, Hairs, Wigs& Make-Up Cardle Hancock, Musical Director Michael Cullen, Musical Director (Cover) Elliott Ware, Assistant Director Christopher Chase Carter, Associate Set Designer William Fricker, Associate Choreographer Kelly Ewins, Associate Lighting Designer  Eric Watkins, Associate Sound designer/Production Sound Ken Hampton, Associate Costume Designer Deborah Andres, Associate Casting Richard Johnson, Fight Director Terry King, Resident Director Rachel Heyburn.

Production manager Tom Nickson, Costume Supervisor Sharon Williams, Props Supervisor Robyn Hardy, Company manager Andrew Owen, Stage Manager Hayley Craven, DSM Charlotte Johnson, ASMs Libby Glass, Assen Chan, Technical ASM Benedict Jones, Technical Swing Steph Weaver.

Marketing Jane Morgan Associates & AKA, General Management ATG Productions, PR Raw PR, Production Photographer Manuel Harlan.

Published December 18, 2025December 18, 2025 by Simon Jenner