Bermondsey Revolution
Southwark Playhouse Elephant
Until January 28

COMMUNITY theatre at its most dynamic is a profoundly transformative experience as Bertolt Brecht has vouched. And it bodes well for the future that the spanking, brand new Southwark Playhouse Elephant theatre has kicked off with this hugely relevant offering from director John Whelan’s splendid brainchild: People’s Company.

To watch this project at work is to experience at first-hand something of the reformative zeal the play aims to capture. And it’s by watching the faces of the wonderfully diverse, volunteer cast – drawn entirely from the locality – that the soul of this artistic venture is realised.

Ada Salter – iconic social activist and central figure in this play – would have approved.

Ada moved to Bermondsey in 1897 into a hellhole of rat-infested slums, described in the play as “the capital of cholera”. Together with her husband, Alfred, Ada conceived a dream, fashioned from her unshakeable beliefs and demonstrable faith in the profound value of human beings.

She campaigned with the locals for slum clearance, for universal healthcare, for the rights of women (still denied the vote at this point), for a London Green Belt, and for beauty in the environment. She was a Quaker, a pacifist and an ethical socialist, the first woman councillor in London and the first Labour woman mayor in the British Isles.

And, despite losing her beloved daughter, Joyce, to scarlet fever at the age of only eight, her dream became reality.

John Whelan’s script tells us these things in somewhat textbook fashion. And because Ada is portrayed at different points by different actors, we never get inside her head. Largely frozen in time, like the statue that now graces the riverbank in Bermondsey, the Ada in this play is viewed from a modern perspective and not as the living and breathing person she was.

Instead, the theatrical thrust of the piece stems from the induction of a Year 7 school group into her legacy, and the modernity is vectored through a somewhat witless holographic instructor from the metaverse, played by the earnest and kindly Eddy Molis.

Effective protagonists there are none. Instead, enthusiasm and delight drive the show. There are original songs by Tyrone Landau, the first of which is set to the tune of Mac the Knife, evoking the show’s Brechtian aspirations. There’s also moving film footage of past and present, while Joao Basilio’s rendition of Landau’s lament at Joyce’s death is the closest we come to emotional engagement.

In the main, though, this show is the manifestation of what community theatre can do to inspire resistance and mobilise action.

At a time when the health service is on its knees, when children fall ill from the mould in their homes, when food banks stave off starvation and people huddle without power in their homes, Ada Salter calls to us across the years:

“If the community will act, the dream is possible…”

Never could an enterprise be more pertinent to us than this from People’s Theatre. This is genuine action to rally the troops.

Runs until January 28 2023. Box Office: 020 7407 0234, southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/