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

THE CHAOS

★★★★★

“The whole show is a wondrous vision”

When front of house inform you that the show is approximately three hours long, the reaction is to smile politely while inwardly groaning and hoping there’s an espresso machine behind the bar at the interval. In the case of “The Big Life” however, after what is, in all actuality, a little over three hours we are still wanting more. It has been twenty years since this absolute gem of a musical premiered at Theatre Royal Stratford East (before transferring to the West End), and its revival has come none too soon.

Set in the mid-fifties, the show opens on board the Windrush; sailing from the Caribbean carrying its voyagers heading for a new life. The characters are full of hope, with great expectations and personal aspirations. We all know the reality. But although this show touches on it, it is no ‘blaxploitation’ polemic. It is instead a true celebration of a culture to which we owe a huge debt.

Subtitled ‘the Ska Musical’, Paul Joseph’s music keeps the blood pumping and the feet tapping throughout. And during the more tender, balladic moments, our heartstrings almost snap. It is Bob Marley meets Louis Jordan. A crossbreed of ‘One Love’ and ‘Five Guys Named Moe’, with more than a splash of Leiber and Stoller thrown in. So where can you go wrong? Adding Shakespeare to the mix sounds like a risk too far, but the ingenious take on the bard’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost” is a masterstroke of theatrical reimagining. Paul Sirett and Tameka Empson’s book (Sirett is also the lyricist) even manages to improve on it while staying remarkably faithful.

On board the ship are four young men who make a pact to abstain from women and drink for three years in order to work hard and make something of their lives. The women in their lives have other ideas. The admiral of the ship follows them all onto dry land, igniting fire into the cold, grey, unwelcoming landscape, and moreover igniting mischief into the lives of the star-crossed individuals.

You don’t need to be familiar with Shakespeare’s storyline to follow the action. The biggest threat of losing the plot is through the sheer multitude of laugh-out-loud moments. The cast collectively throw the term ‘triple threat’ to the wind, multiplying their talents left, right and centre. Co-writer Empson presides over the evening as Mrs Aphrodite, commenting on the piece and filling in details from her majestic place in a box in the royal circle. In the guise of a forthright, Jamaican, first-generation immigrant, she flamboyantly and hilariously dispenses gossip and shameless commentary through the scene changes. Her perfectly timed interjections gently morph into more serious subject matter, poignantly and subtlety drawing attention to the darker side – particularly the recent Windrush scandals. The disturbing irony, and the fate of these migrants is not ignored and is treated by the writers with a respect and an authority that lends untold depth to the tremendous applause that greets the curtain call.

Onstage, meanwhile, the party continues. The seven-piece band continue to belt out the numbers with high energy while the ensemble cast is spreading joy like there’s no tomorrow. So much zest is bouncing off the stage that we forget that these actors are probably among the hardest working performers in London currently. I’d love to namecheck everyone, but each one is a star. I’d love to give a step-by-step account of the story and index the song list for you, but each number is a showstopper. The whole show is a wondrous vision. The score is a dream. Twenty years ago, it transferred to the West End. The standing ovation it received this time around will surely guide it there again. In double-time, of course – it is a ‘Ska musical’ after all.

Tag Archives: Leanne Henlon

THE CHAOS THAT HAS BEEN AND WILL NO DOUBT RETURN

★★★★★

Southwark Playhouse Borough

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”