Windfall at Southwark Playhouse

What would you do for $500 million? A chaotic new comedy about the lottery arrives at Southwark Playhouse after a successful run in New York.

Windfall, directed by Mark Bell (The Play That Goes Wrong), is the story of five low-paid office workers stuck in a dead-end job with a horrible boss. After one of them has a vision that the group will win the lottery, they forgo their usual weekly $5 gamble for something a whole lot riskier. But hope and excitement quickly descend into total madness.

It’s fun. The characters go crazy with greed and act two is basically an hour-long fight – and a pretty ridiculous fight at that. It’s high-octane, it’s vicious. The cast do well to bring a massive amount of intensity. Audrey Anderson, as the high-strung Hannah, is probably the standout performer but they’re all decent.

It’s not a perfect play, however: it retains its US roots with a bunch of American accents flying around but it’s unclear why. There’s nothing distinctly American about the story or anything that happens in it and the accents feel a bit distracting. Why not just set it in the UK for UK audiences?

It’s also hard to tell what year it is. A radio station plays before the start and during the interval, mostly putting out 80s hits. The office decor looks like it’s from the early 2000s, with grey metal filing drawers and cheap brown particle board desks. A couple of the laptops look like they’re from the 90s, while the others are definitely post-2010. The characters also have modern mobile phones, and the fashion is mixed.

Furthermore, it goes from 0 to 60 fast but seems to skip a few numbers in between, leaving a little confusion in its wake around how we actually got there. Yet that’s all soon forgotten as the high-paced ride moves further along.

It’s not perfect – but then it doesn’t really need to be, it’s entertaining enough. Not every play has to have some deep and meaningful message about the state of political-socio-cultural-economic forces or represent the internal and external trauma faced by a victim of these forces. Some plays can just be fun, and a little bit silly. Windfall is that: fun, and a little bit silly.

Jim Compton-Hall
Images: Pamela Raith

Windfall is at Southwark Playhouse from 9^th February until 11^th March 2023. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.