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

LIFERS

A CHRISTMAS CAROL: A GHOST STORY at Alexandra Palace Theatre

★★★★

“The icing on the (Christmas) cake is Paul Wills’ set”

You might think that an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” by Mark Gatiss, whose credits include ‘The League of Gentlemen’, ‘Little Britain’, ‘Inside No. 9’, ‘Sherlock’ and ‘Doctor Who’, would have an off-the-wall, surreal quality to it. To an extent you would be right, but overall Gatiss remains remarkably faithful to the original. Of course, there are surprises, twists and quirky humour, but also a profound respect for Dickens’ storytelling, and a forceful reminder that Dickens himself subtitled his novella ‘Being a Ghost Story of Christmas’.

Fittingly it opened just in time for Halloween at the Nottingham Playhouse, before sleighing into town for the run up to Christmas. Alexandra Palace, with its flaking façade and decaying Victorian grandeur, is the perfect setting. A touch too cavernous perhaps, which weakens the intimacy, but director Adam Penford’s production is aiming high for the cinematic scope of the supernatural. And in that he certainly delivers. Ella Wahlström’s surround sound could have come straight from the Dolby Laboratories, while Philip Gladwell’s lighting creates a vast spectrum of moods. The icing on the (Christmas) cake is Paul Wills’ set: an alternative, ramshackle, Victorian nightmare crowded with towering filing cabinets and desks, slickly rotating to reveal the cobbled streets, the graveyards, or the coal-fired warmth of family parlous.

The tale opens with a kind of prologue. Whereas Dickens’ famous opening lines describes Marley as being ‘dead as a doornail’, here we meet Marley very much alive. Albeit very briefly, before snuffing it, and then we flash forward seven years into more familiar territory. Keith Allen’s Scrooge is a bit of a bruiser, with a gentleman’s whiskers, unkempt enough to betray his miserly attitudes to all and sundry – including himself. Allen has an eye for detail, and we see in his facial expressions a boyish vulnerability beneath the thuggishness. His redemption is triggered more by fear than a deep-rooted desire to do right. Indeed, Marley’s ghost is a powerful figure in Peter Forbe’s hands; a booming personality that needs the thick mass of chains to restrain him. The three spirits of past present and future are not so spine-chilling, yet all bewitching in their own distinctive way. Particularly Joe Shire as the Ghost of Christmas Present – a throned, genie-like wizard with enough charisma to shake the loose change from the hardiest skinflint’s pockets.

“Whisps of ghosts fly above our heads as spectral carriages soar past the bell tower”

The human factor is a touch lacking, however, and our hearts are not always tugged sufficiently. It is the atmosphere that drives the piece rather than true emotion. Some chinks let sentiment flicker through, such as Tiny Tim’s deathbed scene. When Scrooge asks if these visions are the ‘shadows of things that will be, or the shadows of things that may be’, we do feel a quiver of feeling, but otherwise the true spirit is largely hidden behind the spectacle.

And a spectacle it is. Whisps of ghosts fly above our heads as spectral carriages soar past the bell tower. John Bulleid’s illusions, with Nina Dunn’s video design and Georgina Lamb’s choreography create a magical world that fills the vast, sepulchral space. For much of the time, though, we feel closer to Halloween than to Christmas, until the closing moments when the cast assemble into a Christmas Card tableau. A rousing ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ with gorgeous harmonies precedes a return to the narrator. Throughout, Geoffrey Beevers weaves a narrative thread that allows much of Dickens’ poetic language and humour to shine; into which Gatiss has thrown in a nice twist for good measure.

In the 1843 publication, Charles Dickens wrote in his preface that he has “endeavoured in this Ghostly little book to raise the Ghost of an idea”. Nearly two centuries later this ghost of an idea has grown into a seasonal favourite. Gatiss has added a few ghosts of his own that can only reinforce the longevity of such a classic. A haunting tale indeed, but still traditional enough to immerse us in the Christmas spirit.

Tag Archives: James Backway

LIFERS

★★★

Southwark Playhouse Borough

LIFERS

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★

“challenges the audience as it challenges the system”