London Road is many things: a musical, a film starring Tom Hardy and Olivia Coleman, and a verbatim exploration of how a community rebuilds itself after tragedy. The result is an interesting experience, which I think would have made a fantastic piece of theatre, but I'm not convinced that it makes a good film. The words that spring to mind are 'interesting' and 'unusual', not 'entertaining' or, crucially, 'compelling'.
Adapted from the 2011 National Theatre production by Alecky Blythe (writer), Adam Cork (composer) and Rufus Norris (director), the film is, as previously mentioned, verbatim. All the dialogue was constructed from interviews with the residents of London Road - the street in Ipswich where Steve Wright (or 'The Suffolk Strangler' as the tabloids dubbed him) was living when he was arrested. The film takes as its focus not the serial killings, but the effect of the anxiety, suspicion, and press intrusion on the residents of London Road.
There are some striking vignettes that cross the line from being merely interesting to actively entertaining: a news reader struggling with what he can and can't say on the pre-watershed news, mixing up the name of the forensic pathologist and the murderer, attracting a small crowd of by-standers who watch him repeatedly get the line wrong, is absolutely fantastic. Indeed, the bits of the film that were most engaging (and, for want of a better word, dramatic) involved the local press. Whether it was the intrusion of reporters into people's lives, running round the courts to be first to cover the verdict, or celebrating a sentence well-said, the journos stole the show (and then re-painted the show, before selling it back to the original owner at a profit).
Composer and co-lyricist Adam Cork has created a score that feels almost entirely novel - songs which must have presented considerable difficulty to um write, perform, and, er, edit, with each hesitation, each nuance of the original speech preserved. To suggest an analogy, though, I think that it's a bit like a children's entertainer arriving at a kid's birthday party only to realise that he's left his bag on the bus - novelty will only get you so far. At some point, the children will expect balloon animals and a puppet show.
What the verbatim is excellent at is capturing an atmosphere. Short vox pops, with Adam Cork's scoring, blend together to paint a picture of unease, or excitement, or happiness. But it is perhaps less successful at conveying character; by dint of the vox pops' (lack of) length, and the fact that we are engaging with characters only through the lens of the event which has become an imposition on their lives, there was no real sense of clarity, or emotional development. Characters functioned more as a chorus than individuals - which was artistically fine, but somewhat at odds with the claims that the film's focus is on London Road's residents.
Despite its unorthodox approach to dialogue, the film follows a linear path, showing events chronologically, and interspersing interviews between media coverage of the events. This decision was a conscientious deviation from the project's two stage incarnations - in the satellite Q and A which followed the screening, Alecky Blythe and Rufus Norris explained that this was to allow the film to transition gradually from anxiety to happiness, the grade from black and white to supersaturated. While a conscious choice, I think the emphasis on chronology hampered the film, feeling slightly teleological, and as if it meandered without tension after the climax of the arrest and trial.
While there is much to be applauded in the film - from its sensitive treatment of murder, to its genuinely innovative scoring - it does leave a lot to be desired. I would recommend that people see it, but I don't necessarily believe that it was a successful transfer of a brilliant stage project to a different medium.