Windfall – Southwark Playhouse

After an acclaimed run in New York last year Windfall has arrived at the Southwark playhouse. From director Mark Bell comes a story about five office workers, so miserable with their current situations, are willing to risk it all on a $500 million lottery prize. This show explores the relationships between these people and with their evil boss, but most importantly how they ended up stuck in the office and exploring what they’d do to get out of it.

The atmosphere in the theatre was amazing, the music during the preshow and the interval was in the style of a radio show playing hits from the 80s and 90s. This style mainly links to act one and early parts of the play which feel like a 90s sitcom set in an office. A sitcom with classic characters, the evil and uncompromising boss, and 5 quirky office workers. However, the ending of act one completely turns this narrative on its head and foreshadowed the events to come in act two. We see how quickly friends will turn on each other in the face of great wealth.

Unfortunately, during act one I did not feel chemistry between the actors, this made believing that they were close enough friends to consider each other family and be hanging out outside of work unbelievable, this all changed during act two and I think the conflict really helped make the characters feel more believable. Also, some of the dialogue mainly during act one felt awkward and clunky but most of this was also a lot more fluid during act two.

Act Two was very well done, most of the action of the play was here. This did make act one seem quite empty even though it was longer. We see a lot of great physical and dark comedy from the cast here. All the action in act two made sense to me and the execution of the descent into chaos for the characters was great. Overall, during act two choices that felt rather awkward in act one made more sense to me.

My favourite character and stand out performance was from Jack Bennet who played Glenn, his appearances were consistently funny and the audience loved him.  His punchy and sometimes vulgar dialogue was extremely compelling and hilarious. I enjoyed his characterisation of Glenn as the manipulative boss who truly believes that he is right in all he does.

This last scene of this play left an impactful message about people, and how when people are desperate, they’ll do anything for their desires to come true. And how this cycle will just repeat and repeat.

Windfall is playing at Southwark Playhouse until the 11th March, tickets are available here: https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/windfall/  

Reviewer: Zara Odetunde

Reviewed: 14th February 2023

North West End UK Rating: ★★★