Review: Maggots, Bush Theatre ****

Safiyya Ingar, Marcia Lecky, Sam Baker Jones in ‘Maggots’ at Bush Theatre.
Photo credit Ross Kernahan

Maggots by Tony Craze Award winner Farah Najib arrives at the Bush Theatre, directed by Jess Barton and produced by Jessie Anand Productions. The play gestures toward the human cost of lives lived out of sight and systems that no longer notice who slips through the cracks. Without preaching, it positions community not as a sentimental ideal, but as something fragile, neglected and, crucially, political.

The play’s form feels both modern and rooted, borrowing from old storytelling traditions without ever feeling dusty. Three actors (Sam Baker Jones, Safiyya Ingar and Marcia Lecky) deftly share the story on equal footing, slipping easily between narrator and participant, witness and subject. They speak directly to one another and to us, sometimes telling the story as it is, sometimes as the story they want it to be. They pull the audience in and quietly strip away the safety of distance. It is a reminder that stories like this do not belong to one person alone, but to a city of voices and to everyone listening, or in some lonely cases, not listening.

Although fictional, the play draws its emotional force from real and unsettling failures. One such case is that of Sheila Seleoane, a medical secretary living alone in a Peabody Trust social housing flat in Peckham, who is believed to have died in August 2019. For more than two years, neighbours raised repeated alarms with Peabody and the Metropolitan Police about her absence, unpaid rent, and the overwhelming smell of decay, yet no meaningful welfare check followed. At one point, police even reassured the landlord that she was “safe and well.” Her skeletal remains were finally discovered in February 2022, when officers forced entry during Storm Eunice.

Seleoane is tragically far from alone. Freedom of Information requests by James Batchelor (inventor of the ‘I am okay’ button and MBE for Services to Technology for Older People) revealed stark figures across 190 authorities. Thirty-eight reported 134 undiscovered tenant deaths of two days or more over the last five years, with 22 left for five to ten days, and disturbingly, 27 people left for over ten days. The scale of it is quietly shocking, a reminder that the story this play tells is alarmingly real.

Safiyya Ingar, Marcia Lecky, Sam Baker Jones in 'Maggots' at Bush Theatre. — *Safiyya Ingar, Marcia Lecky, Sam Baker Jones in ‘Maggots’ at Bush Theatre.*
*Photo credit Ross Kernahan*

Running alongside this is a carefully braided portrait of a tower block of neighbours. The storytellers guide us through lives that continue, insistently and messily: babies being born, GCSEs revised for, jobs endured, private griefs carried, even as the smell of death seeps in from next door. What emerges is not hysteria but hesitation, the fear of making a fuss, of misreading signs, of overstepping the mark in a city where distance and politeness often stand in for care. These disparate Londoners are slowly and awkwardly drawn together by a shared unease and a growing desire to be believed. The play’s pointed refrain, the housing association’s “Darren”, and all the others who “behave a lot like Darren”, makes clear that this is not about one individual, but about a system designed to deflect concern.

The only thing that slightly trips the play up is that the discovery of the death comes after such a long, carefully built tension that when it finally lands, it almost feels absorbed into everything that has come before and its impact is softened, though perhaps that is true to the neighbours’ experience, who must surely have known the reality of the situation long before it was confirmed.

Maggots is for anyone who notices what society overlooks. If you care about the lives that slip through the cracks, this play will stay with you long after the lights go down. The question it leaves you with is simple and impossible to ignore: who are we not listening to?

[Thank you to Bush Theatre for a gifted ticket for an honest review. You can read my other Bush Theatre reviews here].

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