Review: The Olive Boy (Southwark Playhouse Borough)

Review by Harry Bower

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐

At just 22, Ollie Maddigan has written a fast and furious piece of theatre that’s already making waves, selling out its run at Edinburgh Fringe, and now landing at Southwark Playhouse Borough with an unapologetic confidence. The Olive Boy is a raw, fast-talking monologue about teenage grief, boyish bravado, and the blur of adolescence when trauma strikes early, and nothing quite fits anymore. It’s a dark comedy that rarely asks for sympathy while it peels back painful layer after painful layer until you’re left staring at something uncomfortably honest and deeply affecting.

Inspired by a true story, Maddigan tells us the tale of a 15-year-old boy whose mum passes away, leaving him uprooted and relocated, moving in with his distant dad and starting a new school. What begins as a comic character piece (somewhere between Jay from The Inbetweeners and Tracy from Tracy Beaker), steadily becomes a dissection of how grief lodges itself in your throat, and what happens when you’re too young to understand what to do with it. As Maddigan so aptly puts it in the promo video, “When you’re a teenager, and your mum passes away, it’s not like you stop being a teenager.” As the boy pursues a girlfriend in an attempt to quickly get over his loss, he discovers it’s not quite that easy, particularly when your familiarities are hours away, and you have no friends. That we know this is inspired by true events makes each scene that much more impactful.

In his writing style, the author, performer and co-producer (all Maddigan) does a good job of preventing the piece from becoming ‘too’ anything. It’s fast-paced and laced with crude laddish humour, but it’s also unflinching in its sadness. It doesn’t become a soapbox on which to beat the audience over the head with lessons about grief, but it’s not devoid of deeper meaning either. It’s balanced, and the structure is sharp. Jokes early on feel throwaway until they later return, weighted by context. There are punchlines that land like a well-rehearsed stand-up line, and others that leave the audience caught mid-laugh, unsure whether to continue. In that hesitation, the piece finds its rhythm. Maddigan knows this world like the back of his hand - it is his world after all, and he knows how to manipulate his audience. The script walks a tightrope between cringe-inducing immaturity and well-crafted poignancy. Most of the time, it pulls back before it tips too far either way.

Maddigan’s performance is captivating. It takes about 20 minutes for him to fully convince you that this is a 15-year-old boy, but once you’re in, you’re with him. His control over the pacing, bursts of bravado, and slippery transitions into vulnerability eventually feels real and accomplished. With only a single chair on-stage for company, his presence alone commands the space. If you allow yourself to go on the journey with him, the performance he gives in the final ten minutes is up there as one of the most moving you may find this year.

Scott Le Crass’s direction perfectly matches the tone of the script: fast, chaotic, but always in service of the story. There’s an anarchic energy to the piece that could so easily veer off-track, but like the writing, it is reigned in just in time. He also understands when to let the quieter moments land, when stillness can do more than another gag. Southwark’s Little space is well used; it is compact and close, but never claustrophobic.

Lighting by Adam Jefferys is a standout element. With over 30 fixtures rigged for a one-performer show with no set, it might have been overkill. It’s to Jeffery’s credit that it’s not. Every beat is shaped by lighting, whether casting subtle shadows or delivering full, immersive transitions. The world-building relies entirely on Maddigan and Jefferys’ design working in sync, and, for the most part, they do, though a handful of delayed cues on press night disrupted the immersion.

It has to be said that there are moments that are difficult to watch. The humour is crude, and occasionally toe-curling. Some audience members may take longer than the twenty minutes this reviewer took to fully believe the fifteen-year-old in front of them. But the emotional payoff more than justifies the discomfort and investment in imagination. What seems like chaotic juvenile rambling is gradually revealed as the world’s most common defence mechanism, one which crumbles in the show’s brutal final third.

The Olive Boy isn’t a perfect show, but it’s a remarkably honest one. It doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, and it never tries to make grief digestible. Instead, it acknowledges that tragedy doesn’t override adolescence. Maddigan’s rallying cry to the audience post-curtain and stated mission to encourage more college and school age children to see his show is evidence that The Olive Boy is trying to be more than a piece of theatrical entertainment. I hope it succeeds.

The Olive Boy plays at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 31st January. For more information visit: https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/the-olive-boy/ 

Photos by John Blitcliffe