Writer: Eleanor Cowlin
Directors: Eleanor Cowlin and Lev Govorovski
The shows that do well at fringe festivals tend to continue their success at other fringe festivals. Very rarely do they make the West End, but Eleanor Cowlin’s Debris, playing at this year’s high-quality Peckham Fringe, has West End written all over it. It’s the kind of tricksy self-referential play that theatre audiences love.
Kaia has written a play called Surviving a Narcissist about her relationship with her ex, Tom. But the problem is that before the play is staged, Tom buys the script off Amazon Prime for £8.99 and “rawdogs” it. He tells Kaia that he’s unhappy with the way he is portrayed. He feels misrepresented, exploited even. As they have coffee somewhere in London, Kaia tells him not to worry and that, although her play is inspired by their experiences, it is also a work of fiction. However, she’s done little to disguise its real-life origins as her characters are called Kate and Tim.
Leaning into this blurring of fact and fiction are the names of the actors playing Kaia and Tom: Kaya Slawecka-Williams and Tom Hunter, both of whom reprise their roles after a short stint at Brixton House last year. Slawecka- Williams’s Kaia is a little self-righteous, sure that she has the story – at least, her story – right, while Hunter’s Tom is often a precocious bore, jabbering on about film and film theory in numbing abstraction.
Their fictional representations are significantly different. Tim (exquisitely played by Alistair Ellery) initially comes across as a pushy wide-boy estate agent, while Maya Lewsey, also returning from Brixton House, is artlessness personified as Kate. It’s no wonder that Tom bristles at his depiction as fragments of Kaia’s Surviving a Narcissist are performed in the café where she and he meet. The barista (an eager Sharitah Boulton), a RADA student, is roped in to play the part of Celine, Tim’s (or Tom’s, the lines keep shifting) old friend.
With a simple set of towering boxes, directors Cowlin and Lev Govorovski ensure that the action and the laughs keep coming over Debris’ 85-minute running time. But the last longish scene, played, for once, without comedy, doesn’t quite work as well as we still don’t really know enough of Kaia and Tom, especially their past identities when they were dating, for the conclusion to hit as it should.
Otherwise, Debris is a polished piece of theatre about there being two sides to every story, and it’s ready to go out into the world. With some nicely judged digs at both theatre-making and film, it would be funny to see one of Tom’s awfully pretentious shorts make an appearance. Cordolium Theatre has a future hit in its hands.
Reviewed on 13 May 2026
Peckham Fringe runs until 5 June 2026
