Review: SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE at Southwark Playhouse Borough

Date: 06/06/2026

Stars: 4

The Little at Southwark Playhouse Borough is just that – little. But it’s mighty. It can adapt to pretty much anything, and in this case, it somehow manages to fit entire universes and lifetimes inside it.

As the audience settle into their seats for So It Goes Theatre’s Slaughterhouse-Five, there’s very little to see – a desk sits centre stage, a screen hangs behind it, and that’s about it, but you get the feeling both are going to be important, and as it turns out, they’re pretty much everything. The desk and the objects that are unpacked onto it become the only truly solid things in Billy Pilgrim’s world – everything else comes from that screen, and the results are often breathtaking.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five isn’t exactly the easiest story to adapt, which makes this production even more exciting, and trying to explain the story isn’t really going to help, but in essence, Billy Pilgrim has become “unstuck in time”, bouncing backwards and forwards through his life, revisiting moments from childhood, war, marriage, alien abduction and everything in between, and, to make it even harder to deal with, experiencing it all at once. And this production throws you straight into Billy’s fractured existence, leaving you to work things out for yourself.

But at some point, partway through, something clicks, and although the pieces don’t suddenly fall neatly into place, you begin to understand the shape of what’s happening. it’s like working on a jigsaw puzzle when a few pieces are missing – you might not have every detail, but eventually you can see the picture.

Patrick McAndrew plays Billy as a man who has somehow made peace with all of this. He doesn’t seem particularly troubled by being unstuck in time, he doesn’t seem especially bothered that he knows how and when he’s going to die, he doesn’t seem frightened by the aliens – in fact, he seems remarkably comfortable with all of it, and that’s actually comforting for the audience too. After all, if Billy can navigate this strange existence without falling apart, then perhaps we can as well.

Although the Tralfamadorians are an important part of the story, this production feels much more interested in what happened in Dresden – Billy can travel anywhere in his life, but the war never really lets go of him. Knowing where the story was heading gave the evening a slightly strange feeling because even when Billy was somewhere else entirely, I found myself waiting for those scenes, thinking about them, and wondering how the production was going to handle them when they finally arrived.

What’s remarkable is how much story four performers manage to tell. Alongside McAndrew, Alex Crook, Ethan Reid and Sofia Engstrand take on an enormous number of roles, changing accents, physicality and personalities so effortlessly that after a while you stop thinking about how small the cast is. In fact, adding more performers might have made the production harder to follow; as it is, the company find a balance between clarity and chaos that serves the material well.

A huge amount of credit should also go to Douglas Baker’s direction. A story like this could very easily become an incomprehensible mess – there are constant jumps through time, multiple locations, different realities and dozens of characters… but somehow it remains surprisingly easy to follow once you’ve adjusted to the rules of Billy’s world, and Baker trusts the audience to keep up without abandoning them completely.

The production’s greatest weapon, however, is its video design. The projections aren’t just decorative, they tell the story, they fill gaps, they create worlds, and they provide scale that a small theatre simply couldn’t achieve otherwise. At times they’re funny, at times unsettling, and occasionally genuinely shocking – one image in particular, an American symbol transformed into the shape of a swastika, drew an audible gasp from the audience around me.

There’s also some really good work from Laurel Marks’ lighting design. In a production that’s asking the audience to process a lot of information very quickly, the lighting helps guide you through it; it highlights what’s important, supports the projections, and stops the whole thing from becoming visually overwhelming.

Most stories about trauma involve somebody trying to escape it, fight it, forget it, or move beyond it, but Billy does none of those things. He just revisits moments from his life again and again, carrying them with him wherever he goes. Some are happy. Some are horrific. Some barely seem important at all.

Maybe that’s what stayed with me afterwards. Not Dresden. Not the aliens. Not even the idea of being unstuck in time. Just the thought that some moments seem to stay with us forever, whilst others disappear completely, and we don’t really get much say in which is which.

Slaughterhouse-Five plays at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 4^th July, and tickets are available here: https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/slaughterhouse-five/#book-tickets