Author: H Hsu

You walk into a set resembling an ordinary living room, complete with sofa and chairs. Looking up, you see bouquets of dried flowers hanging upside down from the ceiling. This liminal space, suspended between the living and the dead, is where Maggot takes place.

Maggot, a new play by Farah Najib, tells the story of a group of loosely connected neighbours who are forced to confront an unusual situation unfolding just beyond their front door. The play places a set of highly distinctive yet relatable characters into a social experiment, through which it reveals a modern fable of loneliness, indifference, and the fractured nature of human community in the contemporary world. It begins with something small: a strange, unfamiliar smell with a hint of sweetness. People cannot look away from it, yet no one is willing to investigate its source.

The writing is exquisite. For a play told primarily through narration, the storytelling remains surprisingly gripping throughout. Najib’s language pulses with rhythm, conjures a rich and visceral sensory world, and sustains a deeply unsettling metaphor.

Unlike traditional plays, in which actors inhabit characters who in turn inhabit the space, Maggot asks its three performers to narrate the story largely from the outside. The narrative becomes an object, almost like a piece of cloth, passed between the actors. At times they wear it, momentarily becoming the characters, while at others they observe them from a distance. This unconventional approach to storytelling is executed with great skill by Safiyya Ingar, Marcia Lecky, and Sam Baker Jones. Ingar’s performance in particular repeatedly draws the eye, as they infuse the narration with vibrant energy while remaining convincingly grounded in each fleeting character they inhabit.

Rather than rooting itself firmly in the performance space, the storytelling in Maggot becomes intangible and fleeting, drifting through the room like a ghost. On the surface, this choice expands the possibilities of theatrical storytelling, creating the sense that everyone present, actors and audience alike, could be one of the characters in the story, observing but never intervening.

However, the staging and direction does not seem to fully realise the potential of this narrative strategy. Although the actors continually move through the space and rearrange the furniture to suit their needs, these actions do not appear to add additional layers of meaning to the story being told. As a result, the visual elements run largely parallel to the text. This raises the question of whether Maggot, as a theatrical work, might function just as effectively as a radio play. When the story exists primarily in narration rather than in physical space, the dynamic of watching and being watched, which is central to theatre as a form, begins to feel less essential.

Madly gripping and jaw-droppingly masterful, this is the best crafted piece on stage I have seen in years. While the mini-series Adolescence became a global phenomenon earlier this year, Kenrex, though a stage play, delivers an experience nothing short of that: a true-crime story transformed into two hours of utterly thrilling entertainment, plus a rock concert.

After two successful runs at the Sheffield Theatre and Southwark Playhouse, Kenrex finally returns for a three-month run at The Other Palace in London. The show centres on the true-crime story of Ken Rex McElroy and his haunting presence in Skidmore, a small town in Missouri. Daring, dazzling, and with music that drops you directly into the American Midwest, Kenrex offers an experience like no other.

The script is so excellent it is hard to pinpoint what makes it great, much like the show as a whole. It uses an interview with District Attorney David Baird as a narrative starting point and then, through Jack Holden’s astonishing mastery of characterisation, we enter the world of Skidmore. The opening sequences possess the literary quality of a finely written novel. The story unfolds in chapters, presenting Ken Rex from different perspectives. Through these gazes, he is feared, demonised, empathised with, and even pitied. The writing is fast paced, compact, vivid, and deeply entertaining. It resembles a screenplay, with events conveyed through sharp dialogue, quick cuts, and striking imagery. Yet Holden, as an experienced writer, also knows how to flirt with a live audience. The script is more than storytelling; it is a living, pulsing presence on stage that grips you and does not let go.

Matching the mastery of Holden’s writing is his stage performance. Many solo shows must work within constraints, but for Holden, constraints simply do not exist; the whole world is his. As a phenomenal actor, he morphs into more than ten distinct characters through physical and vocal transformation. Each is not only highly distinctive but also memorable, relatable, and entertaining. He turns every potential difficulty of a one-person show into moments of astonishment. He does not just perform; he creates phenomena. He is the phenomenon.

Under Ed Stambollouian’s masterful direction, all other elements on stage work as smoothly and transformatively as the story itself. The music, composed and performed by John Patrick Elliott, elevates the storytelling and world-building into something closer to a rock concert, pulsing with the life and rhythm of the show and carrying the audience viscerally through every minute. Instead of a holistic set, the production uses movable pieces. Each component shifts, deconstructs, and reconstructs visuals and meanings, working perfectly with the audience’s imagination. The lighting design by Joshua Pharo blends chiaroscuro contrasts, dramatic silhouettes, and forceful neon colours, lifting moments of dramatic tension into highly cinematic visuals on stage. Not a second is wasted; every image serves the story and its visceral impact.

Finally, through the tale of an individual and a community, the show poses a fundamental question. If the law fails in its duty to regulate and protect, then what…justifies its existence? Could violent retaliation against evil ever constitute justice, or does it merely initiate another cycle of larger-scale injustice?