THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By David Watson
The Big House, Islington, Englefield Road, London N1 3LH, until July 18, 2026
I do love going to a theater I’ve never been to before, especially an innovative space like The Big House in Islington, which, if you weren’t looking for it, you might miss. I myself have passed it many times on a bus from this hip North London borough back home, first to the East End where I lived a lifetime ago when I moved to London, then Hackney, and now to leafy but increasingly hipster Walthamstow.
A perfect place to take refuge in the London heat wave of 2026, the entrance to the venue is unassuming. Barely a coachhouse door in between two Victorian terraces, the space feels like you are veering off of a main route through the rusted door of an old style car garage. From said archway, you emerge into what feels like a wider, secret world dotted with welcoming red and white striped outdoor lounge chairs of the variety you often see in rooftop and riverside hipster cinemas. The foyer feels like you’re hanging out in someone’s cool and stylish sitting room blended with the chic of an uber trendy cocktail bar with polished concrete floors and similar looking ceilings, while the furniture is a cozy hodgepodge of unrefurbished chic. The performance space is redolent of a converted warehouse, the perfect environment for cutting edge, fringe theater which indeed A DoL House is!
This play is genuinely gripping. To give it its proper context, A DoL House is set almost entirely and exclusively in a basement room where the main character, the teenage Leyla (played with a brilliantly brittle emotional rawness by Anais Lone) is confined under a ‘DoL’: a Deprivation of Liberty order. And in case anyone is wondering about the play on the Ibsenian title, a ‘DoL’ is a mechanism of the British legal – specifically child and social care – system that has come into being and frequent usage in the last couple decades. Originally intended as a way to keep vulnerable minors safe, it has instead become a dismal holding space with an indeterminate terminus, in which teens like Leyla, coming from broken homes from which they have been exploited by gangs and prematurely sexualised, only suffer further untold damage to their mental health.
The play is also about the care workers who end up getting trapped in this system, with writer David Watson positioning the two other characters in the story, Jason (James Atwell) and Jag (Zarif Hussain), as the pair assigned to look after and ensure Leyla’s safety, in a twisted power dynamic in which both are searching for a sense of meaning and importance themselves. Jason is the hardened cynic who has been embedded in the system too long not to let the power he has corrupt him and enact his own desire to exploit that power. Jag is the newbie who fecklessly wants to do something to help Leyla, can see the system is wrong but can never stand up to the faceless monolith of the courts, government orders, and the contempt of his superiors.
Leyla’s downward spiral is well paced and harrowing, with Watson making a clever choreographical reference to Ibsen’s own heroine Nora, and the way in which the system dehumanizes, infantalizes and makes of her a spectacle.
Slightly mis-packaged as immersive, the design (video & sound by Mic Pool, set & costume by Shaquelle Devroux and lighting by Nell Golledge) gives it more in common with ‘90s/’00s, in-yer-face theater. Director Maggie Norris does not directly involve us, but we cannot help but feel complicit in Leyla’s suffering.
It is not a story that will cool you down in this heat, but the conversation you have afterwards, in which you hotly debate the iniquity of the system, will be engaging.
It is superbly acted, extremely well crafted, and well worth the hour and a half of intimate viewing. But the run is extremely limited. So get to The Big House and grab yourself a cold cocktail before you go in. Both the weather and the drama are intense.
