Writer: Sam Edmunds
Director: Sam Edmunds and Vikesh Godhwani
Your teenage friendships are the most intense of your lives, the ride or die mates who experience everything together, all the firsts – drinks, clubs, kisses – and who, most importantly, back each other up without question. Sam Edmunds’ new play The Chaos That Has Been and Will No Doubt Return is a hymn to a 16-year-old male friendship set in the 1990s that experiences a world of change across a single night in the writer’s beloved Luton. Presented at a fairly singular pitch, Edmunds and co-Director Vikesh Godhwani’s in- yer-face presentation at Southwark Playhouse may need some tempering, but the ferocity of the performances makes for compelling viewing.
Planning to leave Luton for a better future, a character known only as “Voice” plans a big night out with his best friend Lewis, involving some underage drinking if they can convince the corner shop owner to sell it to them, kissing some girls at a birthday day party if either had the courage to even speak to them and celebrating their devoted friendship. But when they cross paths with a shady crowd, the night unravels.
Edmunds’ 80-minute play is a first-person narrative told in unfolding monologue style, interspersed with acted scenes as the protagonist interacts with his best friend and a cast of secondary characters performed by two other actors, including both sets of parents, potential girlfriends and a variety of Lutonians. The caricatures are often slick with fast-paced changes that add to the breathless style that drives the two friends towards an inevitable clash in a place that has a permanent undertone of potential violence. And from the moment they spray themselves with Lynx, trouble seems sure to find them.
There are plenty of films and plays that have taken the same pacy approach to portraying the complexity of abandoned working-class communities in the late twentieth century, placing individuals in a loops of activity they cannot escape – Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting was one of the first to do this and most recently James Graham’s Punch did the same, and The Chaos That Has Been and Will No Doubt Return owes a debt to the latter as the outcome of male bravado and reactionary violence shapes the lives of the friends. If Edmunds isn’t perhaps presenting a new scenario, the play makes much of the everyday humour of growing up in Luton instead, wryly honouring the teenage boy’s need to look the part with their fake Ralph Lauren polo shirts and a long-running joke about buying gin by mistake.
The performances are the show’s biggest asset, with Elan Butler and Leanne Henlon playing Lewis and multiple other characters, often with only seconds to switch between them, peopling the town around Voice with nicely observed creations. Nathaniel Christian in the lead role has great chemistry with Butler’s Lewis, a convincing friendship that is as cheeky as it is deeply felt. Christian as the narrator is full of energy, hammering the enthusiasm, excitement and drama as the night out escalates.
The Directors might consider holding back some of that pounding intensity, which occasionally blurs into a continuous shout to create peaks and troughs in the drama instead that builds to its broiling crescendo, and it would help to better manage the audience through the stages of the story as the boys lose control. But it is positive to see more work that revels in the rather pure and close connections that young men sustain with each other, true friendships that are about support and a shared love of Luton that encourages them both to face the reality of their prospects together.
Runs until 27 September 2025 and continues to tour
