Brixton Calling, Southwark Playhouse review - life-affirming entertainment, both then and now

What a delight it is to see the director, the star, even the marketing manager these days FFS, get out of the way and let a really strong story stand on its own two feet. Like a late one at the Brixton Academy itself, this is a helluva night out.

After a transgressive, life changing trip to London from school in Scotland to see Chuck Berry at The Rainbow, Simon Parkes wanted to be a rock’n’roll star. He was soon spitting out the silver spoon (but he never lost the easy charm and ironclad self-confidence that clings to the privately educated, a trait he cheerfully calls upon as and when) and set off to do something about it. Like another iconoclastic public schoolboy, Richard Branson a decade earlier but without the vaulting ambition cut with a line of megalomania, he became a twentysomething entrepreneur as the unlikely owner of the Brixton Academy. It’s a story that screams out to be a jukebox musical, but it works very well indeed as a two-hander with snippets of songs.Casting is critical in shows like this and director, Bronagh Lagan, hit the jackpot with Max Runham and Tendai Sitima (pictured above) as our two heroes, Simon and Johnny (along with playing a few others). On press night, the real Simon Parkes was sitting two rows away, but Runham so inhabited the character that your mind glitched between the two. We’re told that Johnny has gone, but what a presence Sitima proves, a big man with a big laugh who connects instantly with the audience – a much rarer occurrence than you would expect.

The story, adapted by Max Urwin from Parkes’ memoir Live At the Brixton Academy: A riotous life in the music business, doesn’t sound much on paper. Misfit trust fund kid with no money has the cojones to take a chance on an old cinema building in scary 1980s Brixton, falls in with a Mr Fixit pal, gets lucky, gets big acts and gets a future blue plaque. It’s easy to be irritated by these business-types tearing up the rulebook, always with a hint of that “If you’d worked as hard as I did, you’d want your Rolexes and Bentleys too – and you’d deserve them!” sneer about their lips, but Parkes, on this evidence at least, is different. 

He knew money did not bring happiness (his parents saw to that) and he knew that gigs did (Chuck and, well, everyone, saw to that). He also knew that he could move easily between the Belgravia set in which he grew up and the lads doing security on the door – always with Johnny as a go-between if the charm and the cojones stopped working. He sold out for plenty and I expect he’s still a wealthy man, but it doesn’t really matter. He wanted Bruce Springsteen to play his hall, and he did. Game over.

Runham is beguiling as Parkes, both men born without a fully developed left arm, both with the licence to use that fact for dark laughs and as underlining of the fact that they will not be held back by anyone or anything. He spends a lot of time talking to us, telling us what happened as one extraordinary piece of luck/judgement, and there’s not a lot between them really, piles on top of another on his rollercoaster ride at the end of the Victoria Line.

There are plenty of re-enacted scenes too. A terrifying one is set in the riot of 1985, sparked by the shooting of Dorothy "Cherry" Groce, for which The Met apologised – in 2014. And I think we all know which actual word was used by the racist cop when assaulting Johnny…

But there are many laughs too, some from the early culture clashes between the heir to millions and the lads on the street, but most because Simon and Johnny liked being around each other, and we like being around them. Sitima shows himself to be an actor blessed with wonderful comic timing and, aided by Max Pappenheim’s perfect sound design (anything less would sink even so strong a production as this) a fine musician and singer too.

Along the way, the play smuggles in important social commentary about how we rub along in this metropolis of ours, yes, SW9 gentrification and all. It’s a 90 minutes howl of rebuttal to the disaster capitalists who, having sunk the economy with their Brexit, now want to sink our cities with their talk of no-go areas and millions of people too fearful to venture past the front door. Absolute bollocks!

That could hardly be said more forcefully, more entertainingly, nor more necessarily than in this blazing show. South London stands proud of Simon and Johnny and all who made the Brixton Academy so much more than merely a music venue. This hour and a half of joy tells you why.     

• Brixton Calling at Southwark Playhouse until 16 August
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