Those Days Are Over

Friday night, I went down to the Bluma Appel Theatre to see the Canadian Stage version of the hit play London Road. In 2006, 5 prostitutes were murdered by Steve Wright near Ipswich county. The folks living on the notorious "red light district" of London Road had the media glare shone on them. Afterwards, playwright Alecky Blythe conducted interviews with the residents and created this "verbatim theatre" piece about their lives during and after the time of the "Suffolk Strangler".

This meant that only the various distinctive accents and comments were reproduced, quite ably by this Canadian cast, but also ordinary verbal tics, interjections, and pauses. This gave a realism of time and place to the show. In addition, Adam Cork had set a majority of scenes to music while maintaining the verbatim, documentary nature of the speech. This often resulted various phrase fragments sung and repeated in overlapping staccato rhythm and melody.

In general, the acting was top-notch. The "All-star" cast deftly inhabited not only the main residents but also 52 other roles including reporters, coppers, prostitutes, and other town-folk. I was less enamoured of the songs. Their common structure grew tiresome and only a few (for example, a song about Wright having lived there for only 10 weeks) were transcendent. The rest sounded too much like the Schmoyo Brothers' Autotune The News and its ilk (Bed Intruder, Sweet Brown). The playwright should have stuck more to theatre, where most of the pathos and humour were generated, and included only a few songs for emphasis.