Review: INVISIBLE ME at Southwark Playhouse Borough

Date: 14/04/26

Stars: 4

There’s a point about halfway through Bren Gosling’s Invisible Me where you realise no one has left the stage, nothing has actually changed, but it all feels a bit different now. You’ve got the same three characters, the same three chairs, but, like life itself, things have moved forward. Slowly, yes, because nothing big really happens in the grand scheme of things, but moved forward nonetheless.

And the audience is still hooked.

That’s quite a hard thing to pull off, and it’s probably where Invisible Me is at its most interesting because it doesn’t have to rely on a plot to move things along – it relies on small changes in how people speak, what they admit, what they avoid… So you’re not watching events so much as people living life.

Directed by Scott Le Crass, everything in Invisible Me is kept deliberately exposed. There’s not really a set to speak of (although the stage is interesting to look at, thanks to set designer David Shields and lighting designer Jodie Underwood); just three chairs placed across the stage. However, as the characters start to talk, the audience is able to imagine the things that aren’t really there – the invisible things, you might say.

This is a character piece, and those characters are not introduced in a neat and tidy way – again, the audience has to work at this, piecing bits and pieces of conversation and half-finished thoughts together as the play goes on. Lynn, played by Tessa Peake-Jones, is a 60-year-old woman who has a quiet life watching The One Show and cleaning the Walthamstow Travelodge until a random interaction with a strange changes everything in ways she’d never have imagined before. Jack, played by James Holmes, is a grieving widower trying to work out whether it’s time to start dating – or even living – again after the death of his husband. And Alec, played by Kevin N. Golding, is a man who can’t quite believe he’s reached the big 6-0, and does everything he can to pretend it’s not happening, until he can’t pretend anymore.

These are the invisible people, the people we pass on the street every day, the ones who have secret lives and hopes and desires but we don’t even think about them. They fade away, disappear into the background, and are forgotten, even though they’ve got plenty more life to live.

I enjoyed the way the characters didn’t interact at first, all going about their separate lives with the slightest of threads that may or may not link them together. And when they do start to overlap it’s not some big twist or reveal – it’s a casual thing, and that makes it more believable.

The performances are exceptional. Tessa Peake-Jones somehow manages to barely move and you still can’t take your eyes off her, and her version of Lynn feels very natural, with off-the-cuff lines that feel as though she’s really just talking rather than performing. James Holmes plays Jack as someone still living inside his grief, not quite ready to look back at it, but desperately wanting to, and you can feel it in the way he holds himself – he’s guarded and scared, but there’s the slightest hint of hope around his eyes. Kevin N. Golding’s Alec is still half-looking over his shoulder at the past, missing the version of himself that felt more certain. There’s a bit of bravado in how he talks, like he’s trying to hold on to that younger energy, but you can see it dipping. But what’s nice is that there’s a sense of him starting to recognise that the life he’s got now might actually be enough, even if it’s not what he imagined.

What’s quite specific is the focus on later-life reinvention, and how it’s not framed as something unusual or wrong. There’s a sense that these characters are reintroducing themselves to the world and working out how to exist in spaces that feel a bit unfamiliar now.

There are points where the ideas start to edge towards something a bit more serious, and then it steps away again, and you might find yourself wanting it to stay there longer, but in the end, the play is a lot more interested in showing how people live alongside those things rather than unpacking them, and that seems to be the right choice.

In the end, Invisible Me isn’t really about being invisible – it’s about choosing, however slowly, to step back into view.

Invisible Me plays at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 2nd May 2026, and tickets are available here: https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/invisible-me/