Review: THE CHAOS THAT HAS BEEN AND WILL NO DOUBT RETURN, Southwark Playhouse

So much ink has been spilled on the perilous joy of being young, but this new slice-of-life drama set in a deprived London suburb puts it better than most: youth is about always being “on the precipice of choice”.

The leads in Luton-born playwright Sam Edmunds’ The Chaos That Has Been And Will No Doubt Return are 16, an age at which every moment seems to come with a life-changing decision to make. In a community where the fault lines of class and festering socioeconomic desperation constantly threaten to be torn open, these decisions come to seem even more pressing.

The Chaos That Has Been... is set over the course of a single day in Luton, during which our narrator-slash-protagonist (Nathaniel Christian), credited just as Voice, and his Best Friend Lewis (Elan Butler) prepare for an all-important house party, as well as for the rest of their lives beyond GCSEs. The eventual climax, when the spectre of violence looming over these characters morphs into reality, is something of a Greek tragedy, chillingly preventable yet also symptomatic of something much bigger than any one character on the stage; I wonder if the idea of cyclical violence baked into the play’s title is intentional.

That being said, there’s also much room in this script for moments of joy (and a few jokes about the alcohol percentage in different spirits, to remind us just how young these characters are). The direction, by Edmunds and Vikesh Godhwani, embraces boisterous physical theatre, conjuring all the elements of a local community – the off-licence, an awkward family dinner in a kitschy shrine to ‘Live Laugh Love’, and of course the fateful house party itself. The three actors multi-role effortlessly, especially Leanne Henlon as Voice’s love interest and his mum (among several others), whose ever-shifting accent work deserves particular praise.

The lighting and sound here, by Edmunds and Matteo Depares respectively, are characters unto themselves, ricocheting between frenetic and slightly-less-frenetic according to our mile-a-minute teenage characters’ moods, with a beautifully rendered love scene to lend us peace amid the chaos. There’s also a keen visual and sonic sense of time across the board – with fake Ralph Lauren on the boys’ backs, Sean Paul posters on the wall and early Katy Perry blasting through the speakers, this could be pinpointed almost to a specific year in the late ‘00s.

Where The Chaos That Has Been... loses its way is where it wears its politics slightly too blatantly. Christian as an actor is at his best when delivering dizzying streams of consciousness drenched in sweat, but some of his more narrator-oriented dialogue (through no fault of his own) falls into the realm of over-enthusiastic Blue Peter presenter. The drama is visceral enough that we recognise knife crime as a societal rather than an individual problem, so we ought not to need a didactic speech towards the end to remind us.

When we get past the incident that everything has been slowly, steadily building towards, the actual ending of the play feels rather too neat and tidy, like the bullet points onscreen at the end of a biographical film, and doesn’t quite allow the cast to sit and process the trauma of what has happened to them. Again, the writer struggles with balancing his political aims – the show was developed in collaboration with real young people affected by knife crime in Luton – with the structural needs of the drama.

The Chaos That Has Been could therefore use some tightening – it runs at 80 minutes, without an interval – but the bones here are good. A more streamlined edit could make the best things about this show, its narrow focus on a single community at a single point in time, and its sense of the political importance of ordinary lives and their mundane details, shine all the more brightly.

The Chaos That Has Been And Will No Doubt Return plays at Southwark Playhouse until 27 September