Brixton Calling at Southwark Playhouse Borough review: a great London story, told with brio

This by-the-numbers story of how Simon Parkes leased a defunct cinema for £1 in 1983 and turned it into the mighty Brixton Academy is not a great piece of theatre. But it does tell a great London story with brio and appropriate dollops of live music from its two cast members.

Max Runham and Tendai Humphrey Sitima play Parkes, his wingman Johnny Lawes, all the other characters and a selection of keyboards and guitars to augment backing-track bursts of everything from Blondie to Springsteen to Andrew Lloyd Webber. Like its subject, Bronagh Lagan’s production has infectious charm and cocksure swagger, and it seems fitting it’s taking place in another rackety, converted south London space.

Alex Urwin’s narration-heavy script is “inspired” by Parkes’s memoir and presumably has his wholehearted approval, since it uncritically depicts him as a folk hero and more or less squeaky clean. Neither threats of bankruptcy nor violence from local yardie gangsters can sway him from his mission to drag the best rock bands (and then rave acts and DJs) to pre-gentrified, riot-strafed SW9. It ends with Parkes selling the Academy in 1995, long before the 2022 lobby crush that killed two people.

This man of the people, ambivalent about the area’s growing gentrification, was heir to the UK’s largest privately owned fishing fleet and had a boat named after him. He got the music bug bunking off from Gordonstoun (a “sweaty” Prince Andrew was a contemporary) to see Chuck Berry at the Rainbow in 1975. A thalidomide baby, his left arm ends below the elbow, though he was apparently a school athlete, tough enough in playground rucks to warrant the nickname “scrapper” and doesn’t consider himself disabled.

(Danny Kaan)

Amazingly, in Runham, Lagan has found an actor with similar physical traits, who is also a musician with a decent singing voice. Sitima, meanwhile, is a multi-instrumentalist with a larger-than-life presence. Which is fine, as the two main characters are broadly drawn and the supporting cast - from Simon’s overbearing dad and his genial minder to various criminals, chancers and oddballs – are little more than caricatures. The musicians don’t feature as people: they’re gods dispersing ambrosia through the PA system.

Urwin does paint a vivid picture of the early-80s music scene, revved up with rebellion against the Thatcher government, ready for something to challenge the all-seater venues like the Hammersmith Odeon (as it then was) and the Albert Hall, where A-listers traditionally played. Parkes won control of his building by giving the leaseholders a ten-year deal to sell Watney’s beer, but takings at early gigs by Eek-A-Mouse and Fela Kuti were poor, as everyone in the audience got stoned, not drunk. Bar tallies improved once the Clash, the Smiths and Motörhead started playing.

Parkes put Arthur Scargill on stage during the Miner’s Strike and let the local police use the roof to surveil a nearby estate, while also letting the estate kids hide from the cops. Kurt Cobain dies the night before Nirvana are due to play. “We’re only insured if it’s murder,” fumes Runham’s Parkes. “I spend the next draying praying it’s Courtney Love that did it.” There are tense moments as he lets a Pogues gig go ahead despite an IRA bomb threat, and when he’s stabbed in the foyer

Despite the pedestrian, this-happened-then-that-happened nature of the narrative, this is a story rich with incidental detail and myth, powered by two absurd, OTT performances. Pretty rock ‘n’ roll, in other words.

Southwark Playhouse, to Aug 16; southwarkplayhouse.co.uk