Review: SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE at Southwark Playhouse Borough

Stuart King 8 June, 2026, 10:05

As an American prisoner of war (housed at the slaughterhouse of the title), Billy Pilgrim survives the carpet bombing of Dresden towards the latter stages of World War II and is promptly abducted by aliens. Later, he survives a plane crash and becomes an optometrist! Kurt Vonnegut's impossibly convoluted classic late 60s novel has been adapted for the stage by Eric Simonson, with commendable, if mixed, results.

Slaughterhouse-Five at Southwark Playhouse Borough. Photo by Henry Hu

The strength of the novel lies perhaps in its disjointed segmentation, with the stage version necessarily jumping back and forth in emulation. Four cast members Patrick McAndrew (as the hapless and rather dull Billy), Alex Crook, Sofia Engstrand and Ethan Reid don army fatigues and an assortment of supplementary adornments (wigs, glasses, other clothing) as they visit various earthly locales playing multitudinous roles. Some of them also experience the fourth dimension, courtesy of an escapade in a UFO, with time (past, present and future) spent on the planet Tralfamadore which exists gazillions of light years from Earth. It is here that Billy (along with fellow abductee, the beautiful film actress Montana Wildhack) become zoo exhibits and are encouraged to mate for the general entertainment of their green hosts who are two feet tall and have eyes in the palms of their hands through which they perceive the observable universe in four dimensions.

It's all pretty ludicrous and warped, (and frankly on paper should be unstageable), but the creative team have come up trumps with a double layered projection set-up where the actors perform in front of, and between, the screens. Douglas Baker serves as both the video designer and quite sensibly, the director of the piece. This combining of the technical creation with oversight of the whole, enables and facilitates the otherwise disjointed stream of events, to flow with a perceptible intent rather than allowing things to disintegrate into an irritatingly random mess.

For all its inherent zaniness, there are definite and defiant anti-war messages peppered throughout the text which are enhanced by the aforementioned video projections. In particular, the aerial destruction footage of the non-military target of Dresden (which over a couple of nights in mid-February 1945 was turned into a firestorm by allied bombers which dropped 4,000 tons of incendiary high explosives), is a harrowing and sobering watch. As anti-war messages go, the piece contains profoundly sad resonances with the current state of global relations. Is it an entertaining and accomplished piece of fringe theatre? In many ways, yes. Would I want to sit through it all again? Definitely not.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE plays 85 minutes straight through without interval and continues at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 4th July.