Southwark Playhouse's Little space kicks off the year with a rep season transferring from Plymouth. The banner name it's been given is "Strange Tales From The West Country," something certainly borne out by
The War Has Not Yet Started - the strangeness at least, the country it comes from is actually Russia. Mikhail Durnenkov's play, translated here by Noah Birksted-Breen, is a darkly surreal sketch show in which Hannah Britland, Sarah Hadland and Mark Quartley run through a series of scenes of very modern paranoia and isolation. Gordon Anderson's production matter-of-factly casts the roles age- and gender-blind, so in a couple of permutations Quartley is a mother, Britland a father and Hadland their son. In the same costumes throughout they bring a naturalistic performance style to scenes that are anything but.
