Southwark Playhouse

I'm your host and West End Frame editor, Andrew Tomlins, and each week, I speak to someone from the world of theater.

Today's guest is Eve Shannon-Wilson, who is playing Blanche in the UK premiere of Jane Eyre the Musical at Southwark Playhouse Elephant.

Eve was in the West End production of the Phantom of the Opera.

She was initially the second cover for Christine, later becoming the first cover, before taking over as the Christine alternate.

Yes.

[laughs]

Um, yeah, we're, we are currently in the audience of the Southwark Playhouse Elephant, uh, where we are currently performing Jane Eyre the Musical.

Yeah.

hear what your mother has to say about this if she goes to see

yeah get her in there it's only on for 16 performances so you have to get her in there quickly One other thing I did want to very quickly mention is 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, which is an adaptation of a Patrick Hamilton novel at Southwark Playhouse Borough.

It's adapted by Simon Reid, who, well, it's an adaptation, as they say, of people slumming it and drinking their way through the interwar years in London, when London was sort of grimy and Kensington was not posh and things like that.

It's a terrific, atmospheric, compact show.

And short of giving her an incredibly busy couple of hours on stage in a Fleabag-esque interpretation, I promise you those two characters have never previously been compared, how do you go about making that work? I will tell you the answer as we discuss the creative choices of this production.

[gentle music] So this revival, also the UK professional premiere, it's being done at the Royal Academy of Music, but this is the first time it is being done on a professional stage at Southwark Playhouse Elephant.

It's something of a symmetrical reunion between two directors who have previously worked on very different versions of the show, John Caird, who co-directed that huge original production with a massive set with a much larger cast, and Megan McGuinness, who worked on a reduced version.

They are coming together in order to realize it here in an intimate setting, one in which the audience wraps around three sides of the playing space.

I do want to talk about the design work, set and costume both designed by Morgan Large, as I assume is the video stuff that's happening at the rear of the stage centrally.

Morgan Large has often done a very good job of embedding video naturally within a set design.

And it can be a challenging space, Southwark Playhouse, Elephant, due to its configuration, because there isn't that much you can do in terms of protruding set because of sight lines, because the audience are looking at this from almost every angle that you have going.

There also isn't that much rear space behind the back wall.

I don't know.

I remember myself and Chloe coming out of the musical that was at Southwark Playhouse and we were humming and repeating the song because it was so...

I can't remember what the show was.

It was with the book.

But they did it very much in the Emma Rice way, which is with... songs and play and you know but and music but not i wouldn't i would call it a play with music rather than this is a musical like it's not bothering heights the musical um and i think that works very very well so yeah intrigued how long is this on for

Oh, you've got a little while there.

I mean, it's on until the 24th of October at Southwark Playhouse, Elephant.

So there is some time to see it.

Like you really, like I worked bloody hard.

That Southwark Playhouse though, it's so, like it's very, very that.

It's so intimate.

But I love that.

I want to see the whites of their eyes.

Like, I want to be so aggressively close.

So I love that about Southwark Playhouse.

And Kimberley Akimbo, actually, that happens to have sat in the second row, which was that the first row you had to look up, I think.

which were at the Royal Albert Hall.

Also, you were an original cast feature in the world premiere of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which played at the Southwark Playhouse.

And even playing the role of the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz.

And many more, which we can chat about later.