Lift: A Musical – Southwark Playhouse

Picture: Mark Senior

Lift continues at the Southwark Playhouse, London until 18 June 2022.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about a drama set in a lift. There’s a Chinese opera about a man trapped in a lift for 81 hours (a true story, disturbingly)… Aerosmith sang about ‘Love in an Elevator’… Elevatorphiliacs can relish a ‘Top 86 Elevator Movies’ list on the Internet Movie Database… And should you ever wish to, you can even licence a play called ‘The Absolute Most Cliched Elevator Play in the History of the Entire Universe’ (but please, don’t bother).

What unites almost every elevator drama is the horror of being stuck in one. They’re small, claustrophobic and often very high up. And potentially most terrifying of all is either the crushing loneliness or the cheek-by-jowl closeness of others. But either way, boy it really is a cliche (a fact confirmed from skim-reading that aforementioned script!).

In Lift, however, a revival of which has just opened at the Southwark Playhouse, the protagonist – a busker – isn’t trapped in a lift, but trapped inside his own head, hemmed in by his own depressing thoughts as he and seven others make the 54-second trip up to the surface at the Covent Garden underground station in London.

Our busker’s ride is set to music (not muzak!), as he conjures up thoughts and music inspired by the imagined lives of those he shares his tight space with: a French teacher, a gay ballet dancer, a secretary, a lap dancer, and so on. His fantasies merge with snatches of conversation, punctuated with the sounds of the tube system, and coalesce into songs that escape the bounds of the lift and fill the small Southwark stage.

As the lines blur between the everyday lives of the passengers and the busker’s vivid imagination, we realise that the songs are not really about these strangers but about him and his own heartbreaking situation. This is a 54-second road to Damascus, played out over the course of a 90-minute one-act song cycle. Ultimately, the busker’s ride to the surface is a metaphorical as well as literal one, as his thoughts are clarified through song and he can finally move on from the break-up that’s been causing him so much existential angst.

Lift started life in the late 1990s as a side project for Mountview student Craig Adams. With the help of book writer Ian Watson, and support from Perfect Pitch and Mercury Musical Developments, Adams premiered the show in February 2013 at London’s Soho Theatre, followed by an Off-Broadway run in November of that year. It appears to have evolved into something of a cult hit. Various workshops, recordings and productions have roped in some impressive names – Louise Dearman, Michael Xavier, Julie Atherton, Cynthia Erivo, to name a few – and it clearly has staying power as a musical.

Now, director Dean Johnson (Dogfight at Southwark) has worked with the creators to give the material a bit of polish – and add a new song. The book is noticeably razor sharp, with plenty of delicious bon mots, and work appears to have been done on giving audiences more of a helping hand with the mechanics of the drama (previous productions drew some criticism for being a little too obtuse).

Having listened a few times to the 2012 cast recording over the years, musically, it’s still rather one-note for my tastes. The score is somewhat straitjacketed by its form, and there’s a lot of angst-ridden navel-gazing, so the addition of that new song is welcomed for its change of pace and comic relief. (Director Johnson thankfully realises that lifts also go up as well as down!) It’s also a feistily staged and sung number. Talking of which…

It’s the show’s fresh-faced cast, some of whom are making their professional or London debuts, that really make this a production worth catching. Their vitality and enthusiasm injects Lift with a bright, contemporary and optimistic feel – no claustrophobia here.

Our hero – simply ‘Busker’ – is the naturalistic and incredibly likeable Luke Friend – a former X Factor finalist and Top 40 charting singer-songwriter. Rarely off the guitar, he eases into the role so comfortably, it genuinely seems like a busker has just walked in off the streets and started playing for us. I’m sure that, in the original script, the Busker was meant to actually perform outside the theatre before the show, and if you told me now that Friend was strumming away by Elephant and Castle tube beforehand, I’d believe you.

Sharing the Busker’s lift is Hiba Elchikhe (Secretary), Kayleigh McKnight (French Teacher), Marco Titus (Bright Young Thing), Tamara Morgan (Lap Dancer), Cameron Collins (Ballet Dancer), and Chrissie Bhima and Jordan Broatch (American Tourists/Avatars). Individually, none can be faulted, and together, they gel wonderfully. Morgan is particularly fierce – wow, is she made entirely of lung!? – and Collins gets the lion’s share of the comedy. Bhima and Broatch are also a joy when in full-on Avatar mode. The only way is up for this lot.

High above us, leading the band – keys, guitar, bass, percussion – is Sam Young, who doesn’t put a finger wrong. And freeing the performers from their otherwise boxy setting is debut choreographer Annie Southall.

With our recent Covid-related obsessions with proximity, Lift is something of a timely choice, especially for Londoners. The show positively oozes London, in the way that New York seeps from the pores of Sondheim’s Company. It’s got that pulsing tube-train vibe of ‘Another Hundred People’, too, and the staging – with Andrew Exeter’s lovely neon strip lighting – reminded me of Bunny Christie’s production design on Marianne Elliott’s recent gender-swapped production at the Gielgud. The concept of musicalising the life of strangers also has that Sunday in the Park With George thing going on, albeit with Seurat’s Parisian canvas replaced by a boxful of Londoners.

I’ve always thought that Londoners share a unique kind of morphic resonance, a collective consciousness that feels particularly intense in the capital’s more claustrophobic, dark spaces like, at its worst, the Tube or, at its best, the theatre. We’re kinda all the same, with the same fears and hopes and dreams. Adams and Watson have tapped into this with their show, and the talented young cast at Southwark have blasted fresh air into it. Catch it while you can.

Craig Glenday

(FYI, until Borough reopens later this month, the nearest Tube station is Elephant and Castle)