THE OLIVE BOY

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★★

“a punchy yet poignant reflection on life after loss”

Grief takes many forms. For writer performer Ollie Maddigan, it’s his debut play ‘The Olive Boy’ – a frenetic yet powerful portrait of a teen wrestling with the sudden loss of his mum. Inspired by true events, the piece deftly melds humour, sex, pain and hope as the Olive Boy learns to live again.

Fifteen-year-old Olive Boy – nicknamed after born a little green – crash lands in a new life and school after his mum’s sudden death. Though what starts as a banterous, hormone-drenched tale of fitting in is repeatedly derailed, forcing him to confront the unwelcome truth. As horny as it is heartbreaking, you’d be wise to bring tissues – they’ll come in handy one way or another.

Presented by Free Run Productions and Shoddy Theatre, Maddigan’s one-person play is commandingly written, tightly constructed and full of layers. Swagger collides with awkwardness; grim events are undercut by jarring cheer; a wildly irreverent tone conceals devastating gut punches. Most impressively, complex mental defences are rendered with startling clarity, and real experiences are dramatised with flair. It’s also outrageously funny, albeit firmly in teen humour territory – think ‘The Inbetweeners’ but with more thrusting and retching. Thankfully, hyper horny teen bravado gives way to a “sweet pure boy” in the end.

That said, a few tweaks could make the piece even punchier. The Dalek-esque interrogations could be developed further as the play progresses. The final monologue to mum, though undeniably heartfelt, skirts cliché – especially with its choice of music. Peripheral characters remain 2D, particularly the nameless female love interests, and dad only comes into focus in the closing section. Still, the core of Olive Boy’s inner struggle is deftly captured.

Scott Le Crass’ astute direction sharpens the show’s contrasts, with elastic pacing and well judged physicality driving each tonal shift. The movement direction is equally skilful, ranging from farcical exaggeration to unembellished sincerity. The surprising opening scene yanks us straight into the story, though I wonder whether the fading audience involvement is intentional. Still, the overall staging is fluid and impressively polished.

A couple of slight technical falters, such as mistimed light cues and freezes in the final video, briefly knock tonight’s flow, but overall the design really brings this slick one-hander to life.

The stripped back set design – essentially a single green chair – keeps the focus firmly on Maddigan and gives him free roam of the space. Before long, the sparseness disappears into Maddigan’s oversized presence and sharp tech design.

Adam Jeffery’s lighting design makes masterful use of a deceptively simple setup, shifting through an impressive spectrum of moods with real creativity. The occasional flare straight into audience eyes is a little blinding, though could be intentional in those disorientating moments.

The sound design is carefully crafted, weaving in music and effects at just the right moments. That said, the final music choice feels a touch cliché in an otherwise raw moment.

The Olive Boy’s simple school uniform pleasingly reinvents itself through subtle tweaks. Though someone please cut the tacking stitch on the jacket!

Ollie Maddigan delivers a standout performance as The Olive Boy, pairing slick humour with an elastic, Jim Carrey esque physicality. His range is undeniable, snapping between characters with precision – even if many of them are more pastiche than subtle portraits. His comic timing is razor sharp, instinctively knowing when to skewer a moment and when to let the tension breathe. In a brief burst of ‘The Music of the Night’, he even reveals a confident singing voice. Ronni Ancona’s distorted Voice adds a pleasingly menacing jolt of disorientation.

‘The Olive Boy’ will make you laugh and cry, delivering a punchy yet poignant reflection on life after loss. Maddigan’s talent is unmistakable so catch him while you can!

THE OLIVE BOY

Southwark Playhouse Borough

Reviewed on 16th January 2026

by Hannah Bothelton

Photography by John Blitcliffe

THE OLIVE BOY

★★★★

“sharp and funny”

After a smash-hit run at last summer’s Edinburgh Fringe, Eat the Rich (but maybe not me mates x) arrives at Soho Theatre with the confidence of a show that knows its audience. Jade Franks’ debut play is a brisk, 60-minute one-woman piece that takes a familiar premise — the working-class student parachuted into Oxbridge — and refreshes it with wit, warmth and a sharp eye for the contradictions of class mobility in contemporary Britain.

At its core, this is a classic fish-out-of-water story. Franks’ protagonist unexpectedly secures a place at Cambridge University and finds herself navigating the polished self-assurance of her upper-class peers: the Tillys, Millys and Jillys who move through the world as if it were designed expressly for them. She is by turns dazzled by their ease and quietly unnerved by it, but more devastated by their taste in music, casual dressing, and outright disdain for her native Liverpool. What keeps the piece feeling fresh, not just another piece of class confrontation, is Franks herself. Drawing heavily on her own experiences, the script is peppered with contemporary cultural references and delivered with a conversational charm that makes it feel as though she’s chatting to an audience of her mates (only half true, judging by the crowd the night I visit) rather than performing a polished monologue.

It is striking how little has changed. Alan Hollinghurst’s 1980s class drama The Line of Beauty, recently revived at the Almeida, explored the same entrenched hierarchies, albeit with added doses of gender and sexual politics. Franks’ modern-day account suggests that four decades on, the fault lines remain stubbornly intact. The broader political backdrop may be different, but the rules of belonging appear largely unchanged. It’s fitting that Eat the Rich’s director, Tatenda Shamiso, has assisted on Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys, bringing with him an ethos that theatre should be a broad church, centring marginalised voices.

There’s a pleasing frankness, fittingly, to the way Franks charts her character’s naivety, particularly when she takes a job as a cleaner. She leads a double life: rubbing shoulders with the landed gentry by day while scrubbing their toilets by night. The absurdity of this split existence is never laboured, but its emotional toll quietly accumulates. Things start to look up for Jade when a potential romantic interest appears in the form of Greg — fit, football-playing, and entirely untouched by hardship. But as time goes on, and she imagines how her life would change with him, it slowly dawns on her that the superficiality of what drew them together masks the underlying and irreconcilable gulf between their two worlds.

Though that may seem bleak, Eat the Rich is perfectly well balanced and more positive than pessimistic. There’s tentative hope for a future that feels on the brink of something transformative, even if its shape remains unclear. A fleeting but affecting encounter with a girl “even more northern” than her at the Freshers’ Fair blossoms into an easy intimacy, the relief of recognising yourself in someone else. It’s only through the clear-eyed observations of her sister, the outsider to the Cambridge bubble Jade has become immersed in, that the protagonist fully grasps how contrived, even performative, the whole affair can be.

In the programme notes, dramaturg Ellie Fulcher reveals that the play was first conceived after both she and Franks were made redundant, sustained by jokes that it would all be worth it once they were “big and famous”. That punchline now feels prophetic. With Eat the Rich picked up by Netflix, Franks joins the lineage of Fringe successes like Fleabag and Baby Reindeer. If this sharp and funny debut is anything to go by, she may well capture the mood of the nation next.

Tag Archives: Review

THE OLIVE BOY

★★★★

Southwark Playhouse Borough

THE OLIVE BOY

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★★

“a punchy yet poignant reflection on life after loss”