Southwark Playhouse Elephant

The latest in the endless cascade of eccentric musicals to be staged at Southwark Playhouse is this one man Korean show by Jishik Kim with music by Seungyeon Kwon. As the title suggests, it’s a post-apocalyptic story, in which a survivor locks himself into a bunker to wait out a zombie virus ravaging the planet. Nabi Brown and Lex Lee will share the role of the man across performances, in a production directed by Daljung Kim, with dramaturgy from Jethro Compton (best known for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button).

This review is from November 2025; Ride the Cyclone returns in June 2026. Rollercoasters and death may sound like a strange subject for a musical but Ride the Cyclone at Southwark Playhouse spins them into its own brand of jaunty strangeness. Premiering in Canada in 2009 and running off-Broadway in 2015, it has taken almost 15 years for the Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell-penned show to make it to the UK. It begins with a freak rollercoaster accident dispatching six teens to a limbo presided over by the Amazing Karnak (Edward Wu), a mechanical oracle perched inside a fortune-telling booth. Suspended above a compact, adaptable set — a rotating platform and projections flickering at its centre — Wu strikes the perfect balance of ominous overseer and animatronic RuPaul, warming the audience up with cheeky meta-jokes about theatre etiquette. When the teens arrive, they’re joined by Jane Doe (Grace Galloway), a mysterious girl with no memory and no head, and informed — albeit in riddles — of the rules of a contest in which only one of them will earn a second chance at life. Each must plead their case: Ocean (Baylie Carson), the pro-democracy overachiever with a moral compass; Noel (Damon Gould), the romantic with hopes of living it out in Paris; Mischa (Bartek Kraszewski), the rage-filled rapper with a surprisingly tender underbelly; Ricky (Jack Maverick), the formerly mute comic-book-loving fantasist; and Constance (Robyn Gilbertson), the ‘nicest’ girl in town, who carries...