Yesterday we escaped our subterranean office cubicles to attend the new play, ‘The Chaos That Has Been and Will No Doubt Return’ at Southwark Playhouse. As the play is interspersed with party music and scenes of drug taking, we had to get it signed off from HR manager Keith, who’s musical nirvana was achieved this year at Glasto when he saw Rod Stewart and Lulu singing ‘Hot Legs’. He therefore rejected our request stating that the music was, in his own parlance, ‘too trendy’. When we gently pointed out that these bangers are in fact over 20 years old he relented.
The Chaos is set mostly over one seminal night in the lives of Luton teenagers Voice and Lewis. Also in the mix is Lakeisha, who assumes various guises from love interest to mother, birthday girl, and fact checker. Armed with fake Polo shirts, Top Shop jeans and Lewis’s Blackberry, the boys are caught at the crossroads of ebullience and insecurity, of teenage rebellion and adult responsibility. Coming from rough backgrounds, Voice describes Luton as a dead end for some and the start of an amazing journey for others. The airport being used as an apt metaphor for escape.
We follow the boys as they get ready for a banging bash around the corner, and out pops the Lynx and clean shirts. To symbolise their evolution into adulthood, the only booze they can get their hands the tipple of their parents, gin. This is a very physical play, and in parts it resembles interpretive dance more than theatre. We particularly enjoyed a slightly spaced-out Lewis as he watches life, including his own, pass before him. This reminded us of when Phil from accounts comes to work on a Monday morning with flecks of glitter still in his ear.
The phrase oft repeated by Voice is that the boys are on ‘the precipice of choice’. As the party draws near the boys debate the merits of going to Uni, entering relationships, and figuring out how to not end up like their parents. Caught within a cloudy vortex of violence and gangs, they know the odds are stacked against them. Will their lives flourish and be impactful, or will they fail to evolve and become obsolete, not unlike that Blackberry in Lewis’s hand?
The Chaos was first performed at the highly acclaimed Summerhall at Edinburgh Fringe (where we saw Baby Reindeer before anyone had heard of it, but now we’re just showing off) and a review of that production received great reviews from the publication who want to be just like us, The Guardian.
The Chaos That Has Been and Will No Doubt Return is on now until 27 September at Southwark Playhouse Borough and tickets can be nabbed here.
