Award-winning play The Olive Boy arrives at Southwark Playhouse Borough
Southwark Playhouse Borough will host The Olive Boy from 14–31 January 2026, following a sell-out run at the Edinburgh Fringe and a short UK tour. Winner of the Offie Award for Creation and celebrated for its raw emotional honesty, the play has been described as “a tour de force of emotion, ecstasy and grief.”
Written and performed by Ollie Maddigan, and directed by Scott Le Crass (Rose, Country Music), The Olive Boy is a darkly comic coming-of-age story about grief, boyhood, and learning to live with love and its absence. Drawing on his own life, Maddigan revisits the moment he lost his mother at fifteen and was sent to live with his estranged father. The play explores the disorientation and awkwardness of adolescence while navigating the heavy weight of personal loss. Recorded dialogue from Ronni Ancona, heard as the unseen voice of a therapist, reflects the distance Maddigan felt in teenage counselling and the silence often surrounding boys’ grief.
Through a combination of sharp humour and poignant storytelling, Maddigan captures the contradictions of growing up while falling apart, showing how grief and love can be two sides of the same experience. The Olive Boy balances deeply personal reflection with moments of levity, giving audiences a window into the messy, sometimes funny, and always quietly devastating process of coming to terms with loss. The title itself refers to the affectionate nickname Maddigan’s mother gave him at birth — a symbol of the bittersweet, awkward, and enduring ways grief shapes life.
The production has already won awards for both creation and performance, earning five-star reviews from audiences and critics alike, and establishing Maddigan as one of the UK’s most compelling new theatre voices.
Venue: Southwark Playhouse Borough, 77–85 Newington Causeway, London SE1 6BD
Run: 14–31 January 2026
Press Night: Friday 16 January 2026
Performance times: Monday–Saturday 7.30pm; Tuesday & Saturday matinees 3pm
Box office: https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/the-olive-boy/
Tickets: £10 Pioneer Preview, £16 Previews, £22 Standard, £18 concessions (Monday–Wednesday), £26 Standard, £21 concessions (Thursday–Saturday)
Age guidance: 14+
Nearest stations: Elephant & Castle and Borough
Elena Leo is the Arts & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.