How My Light Was Spent
We spend money. We spend time. We spend energy. How My Light Was Spent asks a more unsettling question: what if the thing we are really spending is ourselves?
Funny, inventive and unexpectedly moving, the production transforms the slow depletion caused by work, loneliness and the demands of ordinary life into something we can physically see. As the characters lose their light, an internal experience becomes theatrical: life is not simply exhausting them metaphorically; we watch it happen.
It is a clever visual idea, but its real achievement is how lightly it is handled. The physicalisation of that loss creates some of the production’s funniest moments, allowing it to examine how life drains us without becoming weighed down by its own metaphor. The humour does not diminish the characters’ pain. It makes that pain recognisable.
The production could easily have depended upon familiar stereotypes. A sex worker can be reduced to either fantasy or tragedy; a lonely man using a sex line can quickly become a punchline, a threat or the familiar caricature of an incel. How My Light Was Spent refuses those shortcuts.
Instead, it remains interested in the people living behind those labels.
The externalisation of the characters’ inner monologues is vital to this. We encounter not only what they say to one another, but the thoughts, fears and desires beneath those words. Their public and private selves exist alongside each other, exposing the distance between how people appear and what they are actually experiencing.
It is easy to dismiss someone when we can only see their behaviour. It becomes considerably harder once we are allowed into the life surrounding it.
The cast make that humanity utterly believable. They never play the characters as social types or vehicles for the production’s ideas. Their loneliness is specific, their awkwardness is funny without being ridiculed, and their need for connection feels entirely ordinary. That ordinariness matters. The production does not ask us to sympathise with exceptional suffering; it asks us to recognise the quieter ways people disappear inside everyday life.
This is where the title reveals its full weight. To be “spent” can mean to be exhausted or used up, but spending is also an act of choice. Life pulls light from these characters through pressures they cannot always control, yet they must still decide where to place whatever remains.
Who deserves our time? What demands are worth our energy? When so much of life consumes us without asking permission, what do we still choose to give ourselves to?
How My Light Was Spent does not pretend that human connection can magically replenish everything life takes from us. Its proposition is more modest and more truthful: being genuinely seen by another person can make the expenditure feel worthwhile.
That is what makes the production such an enjoyable, funny and deceptively deep commentary on human value. Our light is finite. Life will inevitably spend some of it for us. But perhaps meaning lies in choosing where the rest of it goes—and in finding people who can still see us while it is fading.