Theatre review: The Trench

Across the road from Southwark Playhouse there’s a full-sized billboard ad for the show that’s just opened in the Large proving that, if nothing else, Oliver Lansley’s The Trench has a larger-than-usual publicity budget for a fringe show. With detailed design, original songs (composed and performed by Alexander Wolfe, with the ensemble’s James Hastings also playing multiple instruments,) projections and extensive use of puppets, Les Enfants Terribles’ 2012 show, being seen in London for the first time in this revival, certainly wears its high production values on its sleeve; what else it’s really got to offer is a bit more doubtful. Lansley, who also co-directs (with James Seager) plays Bert, a First World War soldier whose former job as a miner makes him an obvious candidate to be a sapper – digging tunnels under no man’s land to bury mines near the enemy trenches. It’s a job with the inevitable added danger of getting caved in when a bomb goes off nearby, which is what happens to Bert and his new assistant Collins (Kadell Herida.)

Theatre review: A Study in Scarlet

The last time Tacit Theatre were at Southwark Playhouse (when it was still in London Bridge) was with a version of The Canterbury Tales told with a lot of live music. So the next piece of literature they chose to adapt was a bit of an unlikely one: A Study in Scarlet, the first of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Victorian drawing rooms and a fascination with different types of tobacco ash have attracted readers for well over a century but they're not exactly a raucous subject for a musical extravaganza. But if the style never quite gels with the material, Nicholas Thompson's production is a faithful and entertaining enough telling of the story of Dr John Watson (Edward Cartwright) whose quest for a cheap room to rent leads him to Sherlock Holmes (Philip Benjamin.) He's given a baptism of fire into what it's like to flatshare with a consulting detective when they're drawn into the case of a dead American, a body surrounded by blood but with no wound.