LIFERS
Southwark Playhouse Borough
★★★
“challenges the audience as it challenges the system”
There is a moment – in fact several – when lifer Lenny, full of illness and old age, repeats the story of the day he bought his young son a trampoline for his birthday.
Each time he tells the story afresh. Sometimes he tells it, precise in every detail, twice in the same breath without realising.
This is what prison must be like, we think. The same thing again and again, without colour, diversion or end. Tedium. Repetition. The only colour arising from memory.
Writer Evan Placey’s sense of authenticity is no surprise. He engaged with lifers to hear their stories, and it’s the detail that sticks: the quest not for paradise, but a better pillow.
Theatre company Synergy commissions new plays to challenge public perception of prisoners. To achieve this, Placey gives us not three dastardly scrotes full of violence and swagger but three old men railing against the quotidian travails of age. They are out of breath and, perversely, out of time. The bantering trio of Norton (Sam Cox), Baxter (Ricky Fearon) and Lenny (Peter Wight) could be playing poker down the Dog and Duck, such is their comfort with discomfort.
For Lenny, that half-reality feels more tangible. He is losing his memory. He has headaches. He doesn’t know where he is. But a referral to a specialist costs £960 and chances are he’s swinging the lead because they’re all wrong ’uns, right? A couple of Ibuprofen should do the trick.
Lifers, under Esther Baker’s direction, challenges the audience as it challenges the system.
Who cares?
Who cares about a fading lifer? As the prison doctor Sonya (Mona Goodwin) tells newbie warder Mark (James Backway), her father has been waiting eight months for a gall bladder op and he’s never had so much as a parking ticket. Mark thinks he can change the world, starting with helping Lenny on with his trackie bottoms. He has an uphill task.
Lenny’s story unfolds slowly. Yes, he is the old and infirm prisoner caught in a bureaucracy that might condemn him to death. But he also has a bloody past. His showdown with son Simian (also Backway) is the most effective passage of the play, though it feels flown in from an entirely different one.
That may be a flaw in the drama’s construction. For while the drama asks plenty of questions, it has so much on its plate it sometimes struggles on how to proceed, using the next question to divert from the lack of a previous answer. Or maybe there are no answers and that’s the point.
Into this world, designed in shades of institutional grey by Katy McPhee, the cast fits like a jigsaw. The two old lags bring gallows humour. Backway grows into the role of optimistic Mark (less a character than a point of view) but his Simian comes fully formed. Goodwin appears like an ambassador from the outside world, weary but with choices.
At the centre of all is Peter Wight as Lenny. He is formidable – one minute weeping, the next threatening. His memories, which fail him, fail him kindly, offering him a softer remembrance of horrors past.
The play doesn’t preach, it points. We shuffle in our seats. These are not easy people to care about. Do we even want to? Have we the capacity for more empathy in a roiling world of discord?
We leave the auditorium free to breathe fresh air and make our own way home. It is a small comfort and a huge relief.
LIFERS
Southwark Playhouse Borough
Reviewed on 6th October 2025
by Giles Broadbent
Photography by Richard Southgate
Previously reviewed at Southwark Playhouse venues:
THE CHAOS THAT HAS BEEN AND WILL NO DOUBT RETURN | ★★★★★ | September 2025
THE ANIMATOR | ★★★ | August 2025
BRIXTON CALLING | ★★★★ | July 2025
THE WHITE CHIP | ★★★★ | July 2025
WHO IS CLAUDE CAHUN? | ★★ | June 2025
THIS IS MY FAMILY | ★★½ | May 2025
THE FROGS | ★★★ | May 2025
RADIANT BOY | ★★½ | May 2025
