A folk musical with huge heart – gorgeous songs, a magnetic ensemble, and a story about what we inherit and pass on.
Ballad Lines at Southwark Playhouse Elephant is a new folk musical by Finn Anderson and Tania Azevedo, who also directs, and it is a show with huge heart. It centres on Sarah and Alix, a lesbian couple newly moved in together and trying to build a shared life in a shared flat. But it is also about inheritance, particularly Sarah’s relationship with the folk songs she grew up with, rooted in the Appalachian mountains and passed down through tapes recorded by her estranged, recently deceased aunt, a character we also meet onstage. From there, the piece opens out into something broader and more layered, exploring women’s stories across time, what we carry forward, and what we choose to make our own.
The show’s greatest strength is its music. The folk songs are genuinely gorgeous, rich, haunting and often joyful, and the score gives them room to land without feeling overly polished. They feel lived-in, like they have travelled. A formidable trio of musicians sits onstage throughout, and the orchestration is sharp and sensitive, supporting the voices without ever smoothing away the rawness of the material. When the ensemble harmonies hit, it is hard not to feel swept up in them.
The cast are fantastic across the board. The energy is high, the vocals cut cleanly through the space, and there is a strong sense of the company working as a unit, carrying the story together. Frances McNamee and Sydney Sainté have wonderful chemistry as Sarah and Alix, a couple you genuinely want to be together, and their warmth anchors the show even as it drifts into other timelines and other lives. Sainté particularly shines, balancing comedy with deep humanity and a playful intimacy that feels completely natural.
Visually, the design is striking in its simplicity. A silhouette of mountains made of white string rises behind the musicians, lit in shifting colours, and the couple’s living room sits inside the rough skeleton of a ship. It is an arresting image, part home, part vessel, part memory. It gestures towards journeys, the migrations that shaped Appalachia, the crossing of the Atlantic, and before that Scotland to Ulster, and the way stories move through generations. This imagery is woven into the score too, with women standing at the water’s edge, history always pressing up against the present.
Azevedo’s direction makes full use of the Southwark Playhouse Elephant space, using entrances and exits to draw the audience into the intimacy and power of the ensemble’s performance. It feels fluid and immersive, as though the story is being woven around you, always in motion. The present-day characters are never left alone for long by the clamouring ghosts of the past. Some choreography sequences work beautifully as symbolic storytelling, though a few images spell themselves out a little too clearly. A touch more invention in the movement vocabulary would have better matched the musical variety and the show’s blended styles.
Where the piece occasionally falters is in how quickly it moves through certain emotional turning points. Sarah’s decision that she wants to have a baby, for instance, comes soon after receiving the box from her aunt. It is explained, and the songs work hard to carry the emotion, but the character progression can feel sketched rather than fully earned. Similarly, a few themes are raised without enough time to properly land, such as Alix describing the complexity of bringing a Black child with two mothers into the dangers of an increasingly fascist country, only for this concern to be set aside as the plot moves on to serve Sarah’s journey.
Still, the central story is not trying to be surprising. It unfolds in recognisable ways, and the real joy comes from the music and the breadth of women’s stories threaded through it, even as the structure struggles to fully support the ambition of its scope. There is something genuinely moving about watching a queer character find herself in these songs and reclaim them as her own.
Overall, Ballad Lines is a celebratory night out with a great deal of heart, a beautifully realised musical with an immensely talented cast and musicians, and a score that lingers long after the final note.