THE CHAOS THAT HAS BEEN AND WILL NO DOUBT RETURN
Southwark Playhouse Borough
★★★★★
“There is humour in abundance – terrible gin, awkward meet-cutes, frantic booze runs – but Edmunds also weaves in harder truths”
One night in Luton. Sounds like hell. But it’s going to be a trip.
There will be tears. There will be laughter. You will make friends and say goodbye.
But don’t be frightened, two best mates – familiar because they’re everyone’s best mate ¬– are taking us on a tour both of their own turf and their outlook in writer-director Sam Edmunds dazzling, vibrant and rocking anthem to teenage kicks.
It’s sometime in the 2000s. A house party is the frame – we’re going from pre-drinks bravado to dazed aftermath – but what Chalk Line Theatre delivers is an odyssey into the heart of a community, co-directed with Vikesh Godhwani and performed with unrelenting, heart-pounding gusto.
This is Under Milk Wood for millennials.
Nathaniel Christian and Elan Butler – both remarkable for their stamina and craft – explode onto the stage, whipping up the audience before we have even caught our breath. Leanne Henlon joins them in a carousel of cameos: mums, mates, corner-shop clerks, each sketched with quick wit and affectionate precision.
Rob Miles’s set of looming brick blocks doubles as playground, alley, shop and living room, while Matteo Depares’s sound design adds percussive punch to accompany chest-thumps and fist-bangs.
It is high-energy stuff, rattling along at 100 miles an hour. The dancing is contagious. The flirting gorgeous. The bond between the bros becomes one we love and share, and the audience is part of the gang from the outset, the trio exuding charm through clouds of Lynx Africa, fist-bumping their new pals in the front row.
The text is rich in 00s detail: Tinie Tempah on tinny speakers, Blackberrys buzzing in pockets, fake Ralph Laurens worn like armour. There is humour in abundance – terrible gin, awkward meet-cutes, frantic booze runs – but Edmunds also weaves in harder truths. Debt as a weight. Futures clouded by recession, tuition fees, and the claustrophobic squeeze of austerity Britain. Adults dream of better, but as one character notes, “People round here walk as if they are being held back.”
What keeps the play aloft is its refusal to demonise. It never pillories working-class kids on council estates; instead, it honours their energy, humour and ¬– above all – hope. Hope is the dope.
If there is fury, it comes from fear; if there is violence, it is the consequence of deprivation. The writing is affectionate, sharp, and sometimes filthy but everyone in the audience recognises something from their own youth in this pick’n’mix panorama of bluster and pain.
The cast’s commitment is total. Narrator Christian sustains the pace, anchoring the whirlwind with charisma and warmth. He is our Captain Cat, seeing through windows and into souls. Butler – with a cheerful loping melancholy – bounces between bravado and vulnerability, Henlon dazzles with her versatility, dancer, temptress, bully. Together they radiate raw joy. Even when tragedy strikes, the finale brims with uplift. It is impossible not to leave smiling.
This is theatre as rallying cry. Against knife crime, against despair, for pride of place and community, for ground-up revolution. Chalk Line has an excellent track record but The Chaos That Has Been and Will No Doubt Return feels like the clincher.
Brash, funny, bold and exuberant. Total theatre.
THE CHAOS THAT HAS BEEN AND WILL NO DOUBT RETURN
Southwark Playhouse Borough
Reviewed on 4th September 2025
by Giles Broadbent
Photography by Harry Elletson
Recently reviewed at Southwark Playhouse venues:
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
SUPERSONIC MAN | ★★★★ | April 2025
MIDNIGHT COWBOY | ★★ | April 2025
WILKO | ★★★ | March 2025
