Simon Ward reviews Brixton Calling at the Southwark Playhouse Borough

Just over ten years ago, Simon Parkes wrote his memoir Live At The Brixton Academy describing the incredible true story of how he acquired the lease on the building that would become the Brixton Academy for £1, before subsequently selling it on, over ten years later, for £2.5 million. Writer Alex Urwin and director Bronagh Lagan have turned this raw material into a raucous, wild and irreverent play, which immerses the audience in one of the best of those Academy nights. Set designer Nik Corrall has created a circular arrangement of lights in front of the stage, no doubt in homage to the Academy’s famous dome. Parkes himself is played by Max Runham, while his close collaborator Johnny Lawes is played by Tendai Humphrey Sitima. As well as telling the story, the pair rock out repeatedly through the course of the show as they relive some of the venue’s outstanding performances. Max Pappenheim manages the sound brilliantly – it rocks, but is never overwhelming.

If the fairytale sounds too good to be true, the play makes clear the many challenges and obstacles in the way before success finally arrived. Indeed, if it weren’t for Johnny and his intimate knowledge of how to navigate the Brixton scene, it’s likely that the project would have failed before it even began. Their initial encounter when Parkes turns up on his first day as owner is perfectly rendered, and the sense of a team coalescing around his dream is palpable. Although their backgrounds and heritage are worlds apart, they are bonded by the conviction that music has the power to bring people together and move them in a way that nothing else can. And that creating a space for that to happen, in a landscape otherwise dominated by old-style seated venues, is a vitally important endeavour.

We learn that Parkes is Northern, from a family whose wealth comes from the fishing trade, and that he was sent away to boarding school in Scotland. But his true passion is music – he comes to life on an illicit escape from school to see Chuck Berry at the legendary Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park. All he ever wants to do is be part of that world. And his public school bravado stands him in good stead when negotiating with the brewery who hold the leasehold to his building – he holds his nerve knowing that somehow he will make it work.

The play does not shy away from the realities of life in the 1980s and 1990s – politically dominated by Thatcherism and the dismantling of the welfare state – with Brixton’s large Black community often a target of police intimidation tactics, leading to riots and disorder. In spite of it all, the Academy stood firm and never fell to forces of capitalism or gangsterism. Enough people shared Parkes’s vision to keep it alive. Brixton Academy was, and remains, a truly great place to experience live music, and this play is a suitably wonderful homage to the days of its magical rebirth.

Brixton Calling is playing at the Southwark Playhouse Borough until Saturday 16th August