London Road (review)

On the face of it, verbatim and musical theatre make improbable bedfellows: musicals tend to overstate and apply broad brush strokes, whereas verbatim theatre attends to nuance and seeks hyper-naturalistic detail in representation; musicals favor high production values over the roughness of documentary theatre; and musicals are usually sunny, while documentary theatre is dour. Yet London Road demonstrated a surprising, uncanny symbiosis between the two forms. Both are often presentational in style: testimony obtained through interviews and recreated as a kind of direct address in performance parallels the musical's use of song as confessional. Moreover, perhaps surprisingly, setting such testimony to music serves to focus attention on those words, just as documentary or verbatim theatre intends.

London Road suits particularly well a musical treatment and a concomitant emphasis on the ensemble, because it is primarily about the engendering of community spirit and neighborhood pride. Set in Ipswich in southeast England, the play captures the town as it responded to the murder of five prostitutes in late 2006. Divers voices singing rousing choruses in harmony proved a powerful metaphor for the solidarity fostered among a group of residents on the street where the victims worked and the murderer lived. Also, but not unproblematically, they provided a pungent counterpoint to the forlorn plaints of the largely overlooked casualties of the crimes, the local prostitutes.

London Road emerged from a workshop for writers and composers at the National Theatre Studio in 2007, where composer and sound designer Adam Cork paired with verbatim theatre-maker Alecky Blythe. Working principally with her company Recorded Delivery since 2003, Blythe has created a series of plays (including Come Out Eli, Cruising, and The Girlfriend Experience) directly from testimony she recorded and edited. In Blythe's productions, that testimony is relayed to actors via earphones. The actors not only speak the words of their subjects, but also faithfully reproduce accents and every stutter, hesitation, repetition, and inflexion.

With London Road, Blythe was obliged to dispense with the earphones in performance, although they were used in early rehearsals. Meanwhile, Cork transcribed the cadences and rhythms of particular speeches into musical lines and also composed his songs around other key phrases from the testimony. The musical references are eclectic: here a hint of techno, there the strains of a Christmas carol. The play comprises, therefore, a mixture of spoken testimony, Sprechstimme, and songs, with individual speeches woven into choruses sung by other members of the company. The sung delivery drew attention to not only the content of each speech, but also the idiosyncrasies of its iteration.

Members of the company in London Road. (Photo: Helen Warner.)

The first scene highlighted the elision of the documentary material and its musical articulation. Blythe's original rather rough audio recording of the Neighbourhood Watch chairman's opening speech played over the PA system before actor Nick Holder started to sing the words of the recording. That scene, set in March 2008, also established the strong sense of communal solidarity and a markedly feel-good atmosphere as it built to a celebratory recollection of the London Road in Bloom competition inaugurated the previous summer in response to the traumatic events. Rufus Norris's slick production reinforced that feeling by deftly using costumes and props to signal characters, settings, and seasons.

However, the mood was not all upbeat. London Road is based on interviews conducted in Ipswich over eighteen months, beginning shortly after the discovery of the bodies. Accordingly, it documents a community under siege—first distressed by fear and suspicion, and then scrutinized under intense police and media surveillance. That sense of siege was powerfully encapsulated in a scene in which a white-overalled police officer wove back and forth across the stage with barrier tape, isolating and imprisoning the residents in a web of ever-more-restricted cordons. The production also conveyed the high degree of tension around the subsequent trial and its outcome: Did the accused, Steve Wright...