Theatre night:The Glow.

When a Victorian spiritualist medium, Mrs Lyall (Rakie Ayola), takes a miserable, and unnamed, young woman (Ria Zmitrowicz), who has forgotten her own name and even the reason she is being held in a windowless asylum cell, for her assistant she sets in motion a series of events that is far more mysterious, and more magical, than anything she could have possibly imagined for her own fraudulent act.

Sophie, as Mrs Lyall names the seemingly helpless wretch, can't speak (initially) and she refuses to eat, drink, or even sleep. Lyall's son Mason (Fisayo Akinade), a spoilt bully who has little love or respect for his own mother, takes all his anger out on Sophie. Not least when she takes his room, keeps him awake at night pacing about, and, soon, appears to replace him in his mum's affection.

The Glow (at the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square, directed by Vicky Featherstone, and written by Alistair McDowall) got off, for me, to a pretty slow start but as the story (one of knights, kings and all manner of fairytale bullshit but also one of bereavement, loneliness, loss, and companionship) developed, at times jumping back (and forward) years, decades, and even millennia, it caught me off guard with one particularly chilling moment and another profoundly moving scene.

Laughter pealed out from the balcony of the Royal Court theatre although, a couple of lines from Akinade's Mason aside, I never found it to be a particularly funny play. Perhaps people were just glad to be out. I was. It was my first theatre visit for 765 days! But it wasn't just the jokes that didn't always work. The angular set, the intentionally jarring lighting, and the discordant sounds that marked changes of scenes and eras were, at times, overplayed and detracted, rather than added, to one's enjoyment of the play.

The introduction of some kind of medieval knight (played by Tadhg Murphy) didn't bode well as I feared The Glow descending into some kind of swords and sandals bunfest but on this The Glow made a great save. The play was, at heart, about the stories we tell each other, the stories we tell our children, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives.

As well as of our histories. The contention, or belief, that drove the action was that history is, still, all around us and as Sophie and the unnamed knight journey both into the past and the future and meet with a tank-topped amateur historian (Akinade, again) and a kindly woman living alone (Ayola) who takes them in and cares for them, a story unfolds that somehow felt both unique and, paradoxically, eternal. In that The Glow was a success. But I left with a feeling that, much like life itself, it could have been so much better.