London Road
A musical documentary with book & lyrics by Alecky Blythe and music & lyrics by Adam Cork
Ron – Nick Holder
Rosemary – Nicola Sloane
Julie – Kate Fleetwood
Helen – Rosalie Craig
Gordon – Duncan Wisbey
Jan – Clare Burt
Tim – Hal Fowler
Dodge – Paul Thornley
Terry – Howard Ward
June – Claire Moore
Alfie – Michael Schaeffer
Rufus Norris – Director
Katrina Lindsay – Designer
Bruno Poet – Lighting Designer
David Shrubsole – Music Director
Paul Arditti – Sound Designer
Javier De Frutos – Movement Director
Martin Briggs (percussion), Steve Smith (guitars), Rachel Elliott, Christian Forshaw & Simon Haram (woodwinds), Ian Townsend (keyboards & Associate Music Director)
Reviewed by: Michael Darvell
Reviewed: 16 April, 2011
Venue: The Cottesloe, National Theatre, London
Playwright and screenwriter Alecky Blythe, Artistic Director of the Recorded Delivery Theatre Company, uses a verbatim technique to create plays which involves the use of journalistic interviews which are formed into a script that faithfully recreates the subjects’ words. The actors include any repetitions or mistakes or mispronunciations. It’s a technique devised by Anna Deavere Smith passed on to Blythe by Mark Wing-Davey in his workshop, Drama Without Paper. The work involves going into a community and recording what the residents have to say on any given subject. Previous plays by Blythe included interviewing people in Hackney on the 2003 siege for “Come Out Eli“, talking to prostitutes for “The Girlfriend Experience”, and meeting the elderly for “Cruising“, about old people looking for love and sex.
In the past Blythe’s actors have not been shown a finished text. The edited recordings of the conversations have been played to the performers through earphones both during rehearsals and performance so that the actors repeat exactly what they hear in the same cadences and rhythms of the original speech patterns “with every cough, stutter and hesitation” (Blythe). For “London Road”, however, Blythe has been working with composer Adam Cork. Setting some of the material to music has added another layer, parts of the conversations now sung. It proves to be a fascinating undertaking in “London Road” and if at first it seems stylised and artificial, it is a method that soon becomes absorbing and realistic.
Whether the flower competition is a way for locals to compensate for the horrors experienced, something pleasanter to take their minds off the murders, is never questioned but seems entirely possible, an endeavour that allows their community to be remembered for more than infamous murderers’ addresses such as 10 Rillington Place (the London home of John Christie) or 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, lived in by Fred and Rosemary West. The ordinariness of everyday conversation is well captured but, when spoken and sung to music, the lines are lifted above the banal and take on an almost poetic life. The repetition of phrases becomes quite catchy with a cumulative effect when set against a musical background that often imitates speech patterns. However, for such a ghastly chain of events there is an amazing amount of good humour and it seems wrong to find the dialogue as a source of comedy. The lives of the victims are not really examined, so the privacy of their families is respected. The object of the exercise, however, is to record the feelings of a local community and how it manages to heal itself. It was, after all, just as shocking for them as it for the families of the murdered girls.
Katrina Lindsay’s simple designs provide a pleasant backdrop to the grisly subject matter. Director Rufus Norris lets his cast speak for themselves, making the whole enterprise naturalistic rather than appearing to be a dramatised documentary. The cast play everything straight and has a feeling of improvisation, although it is patently not in the way that, say, Mike Leigh creates his plays through impromptu rehearsals. This is an astonishing piece that stays with you, laughs and all.
- London Road is at The Cottesloe, National Theatre, London SE1 until 27 August 2011
- Tickets on 020 7452 3000