FringeReview UK 2026

Slaughterhouse-Five

So It Goes Theatre

Genre: Adaptation, American Theater, Drama, Historical, Mainstream Theatre, Political, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Southwark Playhouse Little Studio, Borough

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“At So It Goes Theatre we like stories that feel impossible to tell onstage.” There’s a gauntlet to the slaughter of a small studio space. It so happens that Eric Simonson’s  adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five: or The Children’s Crusade feels huge. That’s with its minimal props, four actors and what probably shouldn’t be called a secret weapon or stellar invention. First played at London’s Jack Studio in 2024 to acclaim, it’s revived at Southwark Playhouse’s Borough Little Studio, directed by Douglas Baker for So It Goes Theatre till July 4.

“All this happened, more or less.” The novel’s themes of war-trauma and subsequent time-travel is experienced as both truthful and the result of hallucinatory truth-telling: when Billy becomes “unstuck in time”. Or are these transports to another planet just possibly real? Simonson’s time-jumping and zig-zag adaptation premiered in 1996 for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre.

This 95-minute straight-through production has been tailored with the director’s vision in mind. Baker’s also the video designer of an extraordinary, almost continual semaphore of whizz-scrolling dates and images playing on a screen that sometimes clears to a small set behind, giving on to either POW scenes or the Tralfamadorian interior of a spaceship, or pod on their planet. This video alone must be up for an award. It’s the finest I’ve encountered.

Patrick McAndrew’s now the central character Billy Pilgrim, joining  the other three muti-roling actors, who’ve all previously appeared in Slaughterhouse Five: Alex Crook, Sofia Engstrand (also both So It Goes regulars), and Ethan Reid. Though we flit mainly between 1944-45 (mainly Dresden), 1948 (PTSD in a military hospital) and 1968 (daughter’s marriage, Billy’s abduction air crash and second hospitalisation), and briefly to 1976, there’s a ranging over Billy’s life (given a helpful timeline in the programme, which mentions things not adapted, though Billy was married in 1946, not engaged in 1948 when his daughter was born). Nevertheless the key events mean actors take on primary roles. Billy’s surprisingly successful life as an optometrist is touched on, though lives better as metaphor.

Accommodating Billy’s ceaseless jumps back and forward in time, the video divides the stage so sometimes actors are glimpsed darkly through its gauze; and sometimes seen clear, ingeniously lit and sequenced by Laurel Marks. It’s where composer and sound designer Calum Perrin synchs music to images, and movement director Matthew Coulton has actors scurrying on the spot, particularly in the 1944-45 timelines.

Beyond dates and images, various figures including German soldiers, a barber-shop quartet and footage of the Dresden bombing from the air and devastating ground photographs play greyscale guignol on the screen. Figures interact with actors behind them, and so on. It’s a piece of storytelling that, despite a couple of tiny lapses in chronology leaving things unclear (easily rectified) it leaves the complexity both clear and heltering along. You might want to gasp, but you know where you are.

Written as a response in part to Vietnam and a way of laying Vonnegut’s last-war traumas to bed as seeds to explain new ones, it’s a novel that was banned in many schools for being precisely what it critiques.

So in 1944, Billy, a chaplain’s assistant is captured long with Roland Weary (Crook) a sadistic, bullying patriot who convinces a crazed Paul Lazarro (Reid) that he’s dying because of Billy. When Weary does peg out, Lazarro swears to kill Billy because revenge is “the sweetest thing in life.” Meanwhile Crook morphs into a British doctor colonel who tries to cajole American POWs into staying alive, and is chummy with the Germans; played mainly by Engstrand. Who’s later Billy’s mother and gushily insecure but warm wife Valencia; as well as exasperated daughter Barbara.

There’s a comedically droll range of characters who feed Billy’s life and possibly hallucinations, like Crook’s 1948 co-patient Eliot Rosewater, who went on the rampage; and who introduces Billy to obscure sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, also Crook. The organisation of Vonnegut’s novel and Simonson’s adaptation introduce characters at just the right nudge of plot.

For instance Trout talks of porn-film-star Montana Wildhack’s disappearance, already prefigured (so Billy suggests) by his having been gifted Wildhack by his hosts (Engstrand again); to mate with on the Tralfamadorians’ planet. On one level, a midlife fantasy of many men. On another, Wildhack has vanished.

There’s additional characters, drafted as one might put it, to underscore the criminal lunacy of war, including Vietnam. When Billy survives a 1968 air-crash a fellow hospital resident, Harvard professor Bertram Rumfoord, initially disbelieves Billy was in Dresden. Soon though they (with Engstrand, a doctor) realise Billy’s truthful and accurate. Then all condemn what was a defining war-crime which happens to define Billy’s (indeed Vonnegut’s) life. Billy even here though, says “it was all right.”

As the born-fatalistic Billy addresses the crowd in a divided U.S, in 1976: “If you think death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I’ve said.” How much he’s learned off the Tralfamadorians, and how much they manifest his perennial, fatalistic world-view is another matter. But it seems to chime. So it goes.

McAndrew exudes the faintly hangdog fatalistic yet insistently wise Billy; he sidles into wryness and a hapless accidie that approaches sublimity. Crook, Reid and Engstrand live and breathe their roles and indeed the company’s ethos: dazzling with small sleights like dress, moustache and accent (Engstrand particularly telling here, but Crook and Reid are sometimes unrecognizable). Reid is particularly unhinged as Lazarro, and effortlessly hunches into the healthy British colonel. Crook as crazed Weary, less crazy Rosewater and half-crazed Trout exudes degrees of Midwest-unhinged.

This is a first-rate production, effortlessly transposing us to Billy’s world, allowing the eyes – Billy is an optometrist after all – to be transported. That is, to wherever Billy thinks he is, or is in fact – going. In keeping with the narrative, it’s understandably breathless, and some small narrative cues which would help, are missing or not clarified. This is down to Simonson’s script, which can be quietly augmented with visual text. Overall though, a triumph and a must-see.

Producer Jimmy Rycroft, Stage Manager and Technical Operator Derek Penny, PR David Burns, Movement Director Matthew Coulton, Marketing Manager Charlotte D’Angelo, Rehearsal Photographer Y H Fong, Production Photographer Henry Hu, Assistant Producer Marina Holmes Smith, Production Manager Eduardo Strike, Videography Nathan Walker.

With thanks to Kate Bannister and Karl Swinyard at the Jack Studio Theatre; Olly Francis, Isabel Pirillo, Joe Venable, Joe Welch.

Published June 16, 2026June 16, 2026 by Simon Jenner