Children of the Night – Southwark Playhouse Borough, London

Writer: Danielle Phillips

Director: Kimberley Sykes

Danielle Phillips writes and stars in Children of the Night, an ode to late 90s Doncaster filled with charming nostalgia for Northern club music. The script is strong with feeling, and the research done to gather real stories for this text shows.

The lives of Lindsay (Phillips), her father Terry (Gareth Radcliffe), and her best friend Jen (Charlotte Brown) are nuanced portrayals of specific experiences. Radcliffe plays Terry’s frustrated attempts to lay down the parental law with charm and wit, Brown plays Jen’s heartache at being caught between two ethnic identities with pained longing. The genuine affection that this play has for northern working-class communities is not just present in the people it portrays. It’s also present in its themes and plot. Doncaster’s short-lived HIV crisis hums in the background through much of the play, a demonstration that Phillips is a writer who treats her locations as characters on par with the human stars of the show.

Phillips’ writing is rich with movement in rhythm and rhyme, impressive and mostly charming, it occasionally blurs into feeling a little forced. However, the lyrical text suits a very musical play. Tune selection throughout Children of the Night is charming and brings vitality to the show’s pacing. Robert Miles’ Children forms an emotional motif from start to finish, and Strike’s U Sure Do brings euphoric poppy bounce to the cheery highs of the earlier acts.

The bouncing club scenes create a build-up and release, which means the slower, emotional scenes between fighting friends or tense families land harder in contrast to the bubbling, hedonistic celebrations of the night before. Those night scenes, scored by movement director Jennifer Kay, are made even more powerful by the dynamic set design from Hannah Sibai in concert with lighting designer Jessie Addinall’s intelligent neon touches.

However, Children of the Night lacks some dynamism in its structure and tone. Phillips is clearly a writer who understands the form of 90-minute theatre very well, and this play hits its notes beat for beat, exactly when it should. The downside of this is that it feels formulaic and like a Hollywood screenplay. By the time we get close to an hour, we know that it’s time for the end-of-act-two, rock-bottom sequence.

Similarly, while Kimberley Sykes’ direction is purposeful and direct, the tone of Lindsay and Jen are too alike, and Phillips ends up playing Lindsay as effervescent as possible for too much of the time. Without variation in tone between different characters, or between the same character at different times, the Children of the Night falls short of its potential peak.

All in all, Children of the Night has a dynamic soundtrack and tenderly researched script at its core, and with refined touches from designers and cast, this class-conscious cacophony remains a heavily worthwhile night out, even if it doesn’t end in kebabs and passing out in the taxi home.

Runs until 4 April 2026