Grisly killings and beautiful begonias
London Road (15) Verdict: Ingenious musical ★★★★✩
LIKE Cromwell Street in Gloucester and Rillington Place in London, the Ipswich thoroughfare London Road is destined always to be associated with grisly events — in this case, the murders of five women, all prostitutes, by truck driver Steve Wright.
Those killings, in 2006, could hardly make a more unlikely subject for a musical.
And yet it was first mounted on stage, to great acclaim, and now it is a film. Just like The Sound Of Music and My Fair Lady, which it otherwise resembles not one tiny bit.
Written by Alecky Blythe and directed by Rufus Norris, the same pair who were behind the National Theatre production, London Road tells not the story of Wright, or his victims, but of the residents of the road both before he was arrested and after, when it turned out that he had lived at number 79, and they had to try to pull the traumatised neighbourhood together again.
Some of them, angry at how London Road had become the heart of the town’s redlight district, reckoned Wright had done them a favour.
But how do you turn all that into song? Sure, Sweeney Todd was a musical and that was about mass murder, but Stephen Sondheim made up the lyrics. Here, the words and even the pauses are lifted verbatim from the transcripts of interviews Blythe conducted herself. Every ‘erm’ and every ‘er’ is articulated in perfect harmony by a brilliant ensemble cast.
London Road contains plenty of familiar faces, including Olivia Colman, Anita Dobson and Tom Hardy in a cameo as a cab driver who might even be the psychopath himself, yet they are all part of the strange, compelling chorus.
Once Wright has been found guilty, the film becomes steadily more upbeat as the community, with the glare of media attention fading, finds ways of healing itself.
Cleverly, Norris injects more colour, ending with a focus on a ‘London Road In Bloom’ display. Where a pot of tea won’t pull the British together, begonias will. In fact, from start to finish, the film brilliantly captures the spirit and personality of our nation, with all the positives and negatives that implies.