London Road
Rufus Norris (2015)
The writer Alecky Blythe is well known for her work in verbatim theatre, in which, according to Wikipedia, ‘plays are constructed from the precise words spoken by people interviewed about a particular event or topic’. Blythe’s biggest success to date has been London Road, first staged by the National Theatre in 2011 and revived in 2012. The piece draws on interviews that Blythe recorded with the residents of London Road, Ipswich, which, in late 2006, became the centre of national media attention. London Road was a red-light zone and five prostitutes who worked the area were murdered within the space of a few weeks, between late October and mid-December 2006. Steve Wright, who lived at 79 London Road, was subsequently arrested, charged and convicted of all five killings. London Road was not only a piece of documentary theatre; it was a stage musical. Adam Cork wrote the music and worked with Alecky Blythe on the lyrics, which, like the spoken parts of the script, derived from the transcripts of Blythe’s interviews. The NT production was directed by Rufus Norris, and he and Blythe have now brought London Road to the screen.
Although verbatim theatre is now recognised as a sub-genre of documentary theatre, the ‘documentary play’ isn’t yet an essential theatrical form in the way that documentary film is an essential form of cinema. We may be more or less convinced by performances in documentary theatre but the basic validity of the actors, whether or not their playing is realistic, isn’t an issue. On the stage, there’s no such thing as ‘real people’ with whom to compare the actors; the very act of putting a real person on a stage, removing them from their actual physical context, would compromise their reality (even before they began to move or speak). It’s very different on screen: the audience has a preconceived idea of the reality of people in a documentary film. (And even when such people perform for the camera, they still express something of themselves.) If screen actors pretending to be persons in a documentary seem like actors, they immediately limit our belief in the people they’re meant to be. In the case of London Road, the songs and choreographed content might seem to reduce this inherent difficulty. It could be argued that, because the traditionally non-realistic genre of the movie musical is being grafted onto the documentary aspect of the film, the audience can accept the whole as artificial – and perhaps many viewers will, especially since people in screen documentaries don’t normally sing (unless the film’s subject is a singer or singing). But there are still big chunks of London Road without music and the settings are realistic rather than stylised. (The film was shot in Sutherland Road, Bexley.) Getting the viewer to receive and accept these elements as unrealistic on the basis that, sooner rather than later, the performers are going to sing and/or dance again would be a rather limited achievement.
Turning London Road into a film is, in short, a considerable challenge and it’s good to report – and surprising, after his disappointing debut feature Broken – that Rufus Norris has risen to the challenge. A legend on the screen at the start explains how the script was developed and promises that we’ll hear what the real London Road residents said ‘exactly as they said it’. Whether ‘exactly as they said it’ means verbatim or more than that is a nice point. Perhaps the actors are also imitating, as exactly as possible, the way that Alecky Blythe’s interviewees spoke their words to her. (Mark Kermode’s Observer review of London Road links it to Clio Barnard’s The Arbor, in parts of which actors lip-synched the words spoken by the people whom the actors were pretending to be.) The style of playing in London Road isn’t, I think, perfectly orchestrated: some actors are more believably real than others. Duncan Wisbey is wonderfully convincing as a resident called Gordon, right down to the suggestion that Gordon gets to like playing to his unseen interviewer and to the camera. In comparison, Paul Hilton, as another resident, who can barely get a word in as his wife monopolises the interview, comes across as an actor sitting on a stage and impersonating an-ordinary-man. Although Hilton seemed slightly familiar, I couldn’t place him in other roles; and I certainly didn’t recognise Wisbey. The National Theatre cast, many of whom are in the film, didn’t include big names but Norris has now involved three very well-known faces not in the stage show: Tom Hardy, Olivia Colman and Anita Dobson. This trio, Hardy especially, might help to sell cinema tickets but would seem to be at a disadvantage in the reality stakes. In fact, all three do well: Tom Hardy, who seems to be doing his most interesting film work behind the wheel of a car, is both magnetic and true in the small role of an unsettling taxi driver.
In musicals, characters conventionally break into song and dance as heightened expressions of what they’re feeling. (Even in a musical-within-a-musical, the numbers will often occur at moments that are emotionally significant for the characters playing the musical performers). There are some very effective speak-singing sequences in London Road. ‘It Could Be Him’ features two teenage girls (Eloise Laurence and Meg Suddaby) dashing through fast-food joints and a shopping centre, chanting the refrain ‘You automatically think it’s him’. (There’s some good use of the decor here, including male tailor’s dummies in a department store.) The surviving prostitutes, their lives and livings transformed by the killing of their co-workers, perform an affecting lament for how things were before. ‘London Road in Bloom’, reprised as the film’s finale, captures the positive community spirit the locals did so much to cultivate, in combination with their hanging baskets, in the aftermath of the murders. A local television news journalist called Simon Newton (Michael Shaeffer), reporting on the Steve Wright trial, keeps messing up his script and repeated takes are required. This is an excellent pretext for turning words into words with music and the resulting number, ‘Cellular Material’, cleverly exploits repetition – a feature of many of Blythe’s interviews and a crucial ingredient of song lyrics of many kinds. But there are times too in the film when a number arrives for no reason more compelling than that it’s been a while since the last one. (That often happens, of course, in conventional musicals too.) Even ‘Cellular Material’ climaxes with viewers of Simon Newton’s eventual report joining in the final chorus although there’s not a strong rationale for their involvement. London Road does include a deal of histrionic business-for-business’s-sake. For television coverage of the crimes and trial, Norris and Blythe have evidently used transcripts of actual news reports. Those who (like me) are familiar with the personnel of the BBC News Channel may find one such report, by Chris Eakin, particularly odd. Eakin, in reality a slim white man, is played here by Jason Barnett, a thick-set black one. Barnett has no characterisation – he just acts excited – yet, as he speaks, I could hear Chris Eakin’s voice echoing in my head.
One of the real strengths of the film has little to do with its unusual form. London Road is not judgmental: Rufus Norris allows you to be ambivalent about the people on screen. You may well feel that the residents are unkindly hostile to the prostitutes yet you recognise and respect their determination to smarten up the neighbourhood and enhance its reputation. Steve Wright was arrested a few days before Christmas: Gordon welcomes the police presence and wishes they could always provide this kind of service, pointing out that ‘The festive wreath hasn’t been stolen this year’. One’s feelings of ambivalence are particularly strong about Olivia Colman’s character, Julie – and the qualities of the actress inevitably intrude here. Colman is such a reliably likeable presence on screen that I’d begun to wonder (as I’ve continued to wonder about Julie Walters) if she could be convincing as someone dislikeable. London Road may not fully answer the question but Colman’s Julie, a prime mover in the revival of a sense of community in the street, is a woman who tells us that she would, if she could, shake the hand of Steve Wright to thank him for what he’s done to improve London Road. The words are more shocking because they’re coming out of Olivia Colman’s mouth. I also liked Norris’s open-handed treatment of a character called Dodge (Paul Thornley), who’s presented in the early stages as shiftily antipathetic towards young women but ends up smiling as winner of first prize in the local gardening competition.
For a street in a town in Suffolk, London Road seems to contain a strikingly high proportion of residents with London accents but perhaps I misheard. The DoP Danny Cohen brings out well the details of the locale – the pebble-dashed houses, the plastic chairs – and the police crime-scene tape surrounding Wright’s house is used, at different points of the film, to express Dodge’s anger and for comic effect (Anita Dobson’s June gets tangled up in it). The costumes by Edward K Gibbon are unobtrusively right. At the concluding street party, I could have done without the bit where a young girl gives a balloon to one of the prostitutes, especially as Norris then pushes the latter’s isolation from the celebrations a bit too hard. The balloon drifting away to become a speck in the blue sky is an arresting final image but I think it was a mistake to play extracts from Blythe’s actual interviews over the closing credits. This has the usual effect – familiar from biopics that end with sights and sounds of the real thing – of making what you’ve been watching seem relatively artificial. All in all, though, London Road is an admirable and engaging piece of cinema.
26 June 2015