Dear Readers, I first saw London Road back in 2011, and was very struck by it at the time – I had never seen anything quite like it. So, I was excited to see that it was back at the National (the play was first commissioned by Rufus Norris, who has stepped down this year), and wondered if I would be seeing it differently fifteen years on.
The play is based on the story of the community of London Road, Ipswich following the arrest of a man who was eventually found guilty of the murder of five women working as prostitutes in the area. What makes it so unique is that the testimony of the people in the area has been set to music, with all the hesitations, the ‘umms’ and ‘aahs’, and the idiosyncracies of speech woven in. One of the reviewers of the initial run described it as similar to the work of T.S. Eliot in poems such as ‘The Wasteland’, and I can see what the reviewer means.
What really struck me on this viewing was that this really is a play about the reaction of the local community, rather than the murders themselves. There are various perspectives, from one resident who refers to the ‘poor girls’, to one who says she would ‘shake the hand’ of the murderer because the area is so much easier to live in now the prostitutes have been cleared out. The initial fear when the murderer is still at large becomes frustration when the street becomes a focus for the press, and there is a drawing together of the community, eventually leading to the ‘London Road in Bloom’ competition. It feels as if local people and their concerns about living in a red light area were ignored until the murders, and now the lives of the people living in London Road have been improved.
The lack of any voice for the murdered women seemed like a remarkable omission in the first half, but in the second half, three of the remaining prostitutes take to the stage and, in one of the most powerful parts of the play, stand and gaze at the audience, holding a pin-drop silence for what may only have been a minute, but certainly felt longer. When they finally speak, they tell of how they are surviving on the money made from a few ‘regulars’, of how they want to get off of the drugs that have brought many of them into prostitution in the first place. At the very end, the voices of the women are heard again, as the celebration of the flower festival is halted for a few minutes while their testimony is heard. And then everyone gets back to the celebration.
What a thought-provoking work this is, and what complicated feelings it engenders, in me at least. It’s interesting that some reviewers have described it as ‘uplifting’, which isn’t a word I’d have used. But I think that it is an interesting take on verbatim theatre, and if you get a chance to see it, I certainly would. You won’t ever have seen anything else quite like it.
And if you can’t get to the National Theatre in the next (checks diary) eight days, here’s a trailer for the film of London Road, made in 2015, with Olivia Coleman and Tom Hardy. I haven’t seen it, but it looks pretty faithful to the play, and will give you an idea of how it sounds.