Brixton Calling – Southwark Playhouse Borough

Picture: Danny Kaan

Brixton Calling continues at Southwark Playhouse Borough, London until 16 August 2025.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

In 1983, an impressive-looking building in Brixton had fallen into disrepair. Opened in 1929 as the Astoria Variety Cinema and Theatre, it showed its last film in 1972. Brief attempts to use the venue as a disco and rock venue were unsuccessful, and by 1975, its owners had converted it into an equipment store.

It was at this point that Simon Parkes discovered it and took over the lease for £1, thus marking the beginning of the venue’s new life as the Brixton Academy. Parkes published a book about his experience of running the venue, Live at the Brixton Academy: A Riotous Life in the Music Business, in 2014. That book is now the basis for a new play with music, Brixton Calling, written by Alex Urwin and directed by Bronagh Lagan.

Lagan has form in the field of telling these sorts of London stories; her direction of Jack Holden’s Cruise, a play with a live score about queer nightlife at the height of the AIDS crisis, earned her an Olivier nomination. However, while that play also featured a live musician on stage, the entire narrative was performed by a single man. Lagan persuaded Urwin to develop Brixton Calling from his original idea of doing something similar into a two-person show. It’s a decision that significantly enhances the play.

It means that while we get to focus on Max Runham’s Simon – the charismatic black sheep scion of a Grimsby fishing empire, who is cut off from his father’s fortune but does not lose the tenacity and charm instilled in him by an expensive public school education – we also get to see him interact with several other characters, especially Johnny Lawes, who would become his right-hand man in running the Academy.

Tendai Humphrey Sitima, who plays Johnny, as well as several other characters and (with Runham) the show’s live music, brings a warmth that matches Runham’s. Whether it is as a foppish schoolfriend as the pair travel from Scotland to see Chuck Berry in Finsbury Park, as some of the various heavies and gangsters that attempt to intimidate Simon, or as a drag queen at one of the Academy’s ground-breaking queer nights, Sitima brings perpetual contrast to each scene.

And that affords Runham the space to fly. While the actor also dips into other characters, it is the character of Simon that dominates. The audacity that comes with the entitlement instilled in him by his upbringing makes for a highly likeable character. Brixton Calling isn’t an out-and-out comedy, but there are several prolonged periods of warmth and humour, fed by stellar performances from both Dunham and Sitima.

But it is the music, of course, that dominates. We are treated to a mix of recorded and live music of the era, with Max Pappenheim’s sound design supplemented by keyboard and guitar work from both actors (Sitima also provides additional original compositions). We only hear segments of songs – there is too much story to relate to allow full-length renditions of ‘London Calling’ by The Clash, Billy Ocean’s ‘When the Going Gets Tough’, or ‘One Way or Another’ from Blondie – but it is ever-present, and it is joyous.

Along the way, we also sense how the venue survived long periods of being snubbed by pop managers who preferred London boroughs that were not quite so south (or quite so Black) by opening its doors to all sorts of charity and benefit gigs, rooting itself in the community while also improving bar takings. As the Brixton riots hit, Urwin’s script also pursues Parkes’ sense of helplessness, wanting to do his bit to help but knowing that he, as a white man, should not be the one to lead. Throughout, though, we get a sense of a man who, due in no small part to Lawes, navigates his own path to become the proprietor of one of the most influential venues in pop and rock history.

In many ways, Brixton Calling becomes a companion piece (or maybe friendly rival) to Sing Street, the Lyric Hammersmith’s new show about how pop music from the same period affects a group of Dublin teens. But that musical focuses on the Day-Glo pop videos, New Romantics and make-up on Top of the Pops. At Southwark Playhouse, we are reliving the days of the grimy moshpit, over-amped guitars and haze that is part smoke effect and part weed.

For most of its period under Parkes and Lawes’ charge, the Brixton Academy was on a financial knife-edge, using next week’s bar takings and ticket sales to pay this week’s costs. But more than money, what it was powered by was love, enthusiasm, resilience and more than a little bit of luck. That is the same sense that one gets with Brixton Calling, a labour of love that has paid off in ways from which we can all profit.

Scott Matthewman