Review: RIDE THE CYCLONE at Southwark Playhouse Elephant

Date: 6th December 2025

Stars: 5

Southwark Playhouse Elephant has been turned into a sort of broken fairground for Ride the Cyclone, the kind of place where the lights flicker just a little too long and the metal scaffolding looks like it’s survived one storm too many. It’s scrappy, deliberate, and instantly atmospheric. You walk in and feel like something is waiting to start – not a show, but a séance conducted with glow sticks.

Perched above it all is The Amazing Karnak, played with unnerving stillness by Edward Wu. He sits in his box like a machine that learned too much and hasn’t forgiven anyone for it. Every blink, every whirr, every dry line has the energy of a carnival attraction that could malfunction at any moment, and that tension feeds beautifully into the premise: six teenagers killed on a rollercoaster are being offered the chance to compete for a return to the living world.

The score by Maxwell and Richmond is a strange, brilliant patchwork. Each teenager gets a song written in an entirely different musical language because the show understands something most musicals forget: teenagers don’t express themselves in the same style. They don’t love in the same way. They don’t dream in the same shape.

Ocean – played with hilariously rigid confidence by Baylie Carson – blasts out a self-promotional anthem so packed with ego you can almost hear her résumé rustling behind her. Carson taps into that overachiever energy perfectly: she’s funny because she is completely sincere, and sincere because she is trying far too hard.

Noel is next, and Damon Gould’s performance makes the theatre tilt on its axis. His fantasy sequence is part torch-song, part fever dream, part escape hatch. It’s bold, unapologetic, and delivered with the kind of commitment that makes the audience dissolve into giggles and admiration at the same time.

Bartek Kraszewski’s Mischa swings us into yet another genre – a swaggering, autotuned explosion of bravado that slowly unravels into something rawer and far more human. He handles the shift with surprising delicacy, giving the character’s bravado a bruised underside.

Then comes Ricky Potts, played by Jack Maverick, who explodes out of his shell in a neon sci-fi fantasia. The lighting design earns its entire salary in this sequence – sharp laser-greens, hot pinks, the kind of colours teenagers doodle in notebooks when they’re trying to escape reality. It’s ridiculous and joyful and lands exactly where it should.

And then: Jane Doe. Grace Galloway steps into the space and everything else goes quiet. Her physicality is uncanny; the tilted head, the floating walk, the blank curiosity of someone who doesn’t even know how to haunt properly. And her song – the ballad that has become the cult favourite – is genuinely devastating. She sings like someone dragging memory out of fog, and the effect is chilling and painfully beautiful. It’s the moment the show stops being eccentric and becomes extraordinary.

Robyn Gilbertson rounds out the group as Constance, giving the character’s home-spun warmth a glow that never feels forced. Her number is a gently unfolding confession that gives the show a beating heart just when it needs one.

Director’s choices throughout are clever without being fussy. The revolve is used sparingly but well, giving the scenes a sense of forward motion even when the characters themselves are stuck. Props are minimal but imaginative – umbrellas, tiny houses, battered carnival drapes – all stitched into the storytelling with a kind of handmade charm. It’s a production that knows it doesn’t need polish; it needs personality. And it has that in abundance.

For all its chaos, Ride the Cyclone is surprisingly coherent emotionally. You laugh a lot. More than you expect to. And then, without warning, the show lands a truth about longing or identity or the things young people carry with them, and the room goes still.

It’s funny, it’s eerie, it’s oddly moving, and above all, it feels like it was made with love – love for the weirdos, the overlooked, the overconfident, the uncertain, and the kids who never got to finish whatever story they were writing.

Ride the Cyclone plays at Southwark Playhouse Elephant until 10th January 2026: https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/ride-the-cyclone/