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

LIFERS

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 1936 at the Watford Palace Theatre

★★★★

“A vivid and moving interpretation. Disturbing, enriching and thought provoking”

Tracy-Ann Oberman’s Shylock stands centre stage at the opening of Brigid Larmour’s brave and provoking adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”; and from thereon she remains in full command of, not just the action, but the unresolved themes. Themes that she manages to turn on their head. It has long been debated whether the play is anti-Semitic or whether it is about anti-Semitism. This show removes the question from the context of the drama and places it smack bang into society as a whole.

Shylock is living under the shadow of fascism in London’s East End in 1936. Greta Zabulyte’s video backdrops, with Sarah Weltman’s soundscape, evoke the tensions that lead up to the battle of Cable Street, in which anti-fascist protesters successfully blockaded a rally of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts. It is particularly shocking to be reminded that this took place on our home ground. The scenes have more than an echo of Kristallnacht. This political landscape shapes our understanding of the text and gives the characters more depth than even Shakespeare could have imagined.

Oberman gives Shylock due reason for her outrage and desire for revenge. Although she doesn’t shy away from highlighting the less savoury aspects of her personality, she is far less villainous than her persecutors. “If you prick us, do we not bleed” carries a chilling resonance in this setting. Antonio (Raymond Coulthard) and his band of Old Etonians are simultaneously ridiculous and sinister. In particular, Xavier Starr, as Gratiano, captures the essence of the bumbling Bunbury Boy in whose deceptively likeable hands, privilege can become a dangerous weapon. Hannah Morrish cuts a striking Portia, overflowing with aristocratic advantage. A true Mitford sister, you almost expect Joseph Goebbels to spring out from behind the curtain. Antonio, whose “pound of flesh” is so famously demanded of Shylock, comes out slightly more favourably. Coulthard mangers to convey, with subtle facial expressions, a half-hidden dissatisfaction with his victory in court.

Liz Cooke’s set moves between the East End streets and Portia’s brightly lit salons. The more light that is shed on the stage, however, the less we see of the underlying tensions. Some scenes dip, and consequently pull back Larmour’s passionately paced staging. But, with skilful editing the problematical finale with its dubious happy ending is replaced with something far, far more powerful. Oberman refuses to let Shylock be written out of the story, and she remains perched on the edge of the stage – a formidable presence – until she returns to lead the resistance to Mosley’s ‘Blackshirts’. It is a significant and unsettling adjunct to the story.

“The Merchant of Venice” is a difficult text, with difficult characters. Four hundred years before it was written, the entire Jewish community had been expelled from England, and not officially readmitted until the mid-seventeenth century. Four hundred years after it was written, the human drama is crucially relevant. Shakespeare’s play is contradictory, but Larmour’s, and Oberman’s, message is clear as glass. Shattering that glass doesn’t diminish it – the relevance is reflected, if not magnified, in each jagged fragment. This is a vivid and moving interpretation. Disturbing, enriching and thought provoking.

Tag Archives: Sarah Weltman

LIFERS

★★★

Southwark Playhouse Borough

LIFERS

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★

“challenges the audience as it challenges the system”