Radiant Boy at Southwark Playhouse: A Haunting Exploration of Faith, Identity, and the Supernatural

You don’t go into a new play expecting it to haunt you for days—but Radiant Boy does exactly that. Set in a snowbound 1983 village in North-East England, it’s a quietly devastating ghost story, a queer coming-of-age tale, and a meditation on faith, shame, and love all rolled into one. Somehow, it manages to be both deeply specific and eerily universal.

The story follows Russell, a young aspiring singer whose sudden, mysterious ailments have both doctors and neighbours whispering. His mother, Maud, is at her wit’s end—so she calls in a young priest, convinced the boy is possessed. What unfolds is something stranger and more intimate: a collision of grief, religious fervour, and the quiet terror of being different in a world that punishes difference.

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Stuart Thompson’s performance as Russell is extraordinary—trembling, taut, and totally believable. He doesn’t play Russell’s suffering for melodrama; instead, he lets it seep out in twitchy gestures, silences that last too long, and bursts of adolescent fury. Wendy Nottingham is heartbreakingly good as Maud, capturing both her maternal tenderness and the kind of exhausted conviction that comes when love turns desperate. Together, they give the play its emotional centre, and their chemistry is as raw as it is riveting.

Director Júlia Levai makes masterful use of Southwark Playhouse’s Little space. The staging is minimal, but the atmosphere is thick with tension. Lighting flickers like candlelight. The sound design growls, hums, and groans. The small stage becomes a pressure cooker of isolation and suspicion, making Russell’s internal chaos feel claustrophobically close. You don't just watch Radiant Boy—you’re submerged in it.

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Nancy Netherwood’s script is sharp, lyrical, and unsparing. It moves confidently between naturalistic family scenes and surreal visions without losing focus. She doesn’t shy away from difficult questions—about queer repression, about inherited faith, about what it means to be "cured." The writing walks a delicate line between spiritual sincerity and psychological realism, and it doesn’t give you easy answers. It doesn’t want to. I wanted to jump onto the stage a few times and proclaim the unfairness of it all, how the main actor's character should not be subject to such abuse - it really sparks the activist in you for proper LGBTQIA rights and mental health care devoid of religious manipulation.

Radiant Boy is the kind of show that reminds you what fringe theatre is for. It’s not trying to be neat or commercial. It’s trying to say something—to excavate something—and it does so with tenderness, intelligence, and eerie beauty. There’s something radical in its quietness, something brave in its refusal to resolve cleanly.

If you’ve ever wrestled with inherited beliefs, felt alien in your own home, or searched for yourself in the dark, Radiant Boy will hit close. It’s a ghost story where the real ghosts are shame and silence—and it's one of the most thoughtful, affecting new plays I’ve seen in ages.

Don't miss this aching, haunting gem of a show at Southwark Playhouse Borough. It's strange, moving, and quietly unforgettable.