Abingdonian 2017

22 The Abingdonian London Road London Road is arguably one of the lesser known musicals chosen for a joint senior production with St Helen’s in recent years, but for many of us, it was by far the most memorable. Unlike many music theatre pieces, this play portrayed a true story, and the real people at the heart of it. The roots of the play are in Ipswich, where Alecky Blythe, the playwright, spent time interviewing the residents of London Road, an unremarkable street of Victorian terraced houses, which became the focus of national and international media attention in the wake of a number of serial killings carried out in late 2006. The residents found their lives turned upside down by the intrusions of the media, and the gruesome discovery that the murderer had lived on their road for ten weeks around the time he committed the atrocities. However, the play does not focus on the murders and their investigation, but rather on the impact of the events on the real life characters as they tried to live their lives as residents of London Road. The spoken and sung material of the play is rendered on stage precisely as it was said by the real residents over a decade before when Alecky Blythe recorded interviews with them, and the audience is party to their thoughts, hopes and fears, emerging with an overwhelming sense of their resilience in the face of the terrible events. As the play progresses, the residents band together, helping each other, and decide to run a flower contest to bring their street back to life. London Road is an emotional and uplifting story despite its grim context, and the production produced both tears and laughs in our audiences, as they empathised with the characters and their thoughts. For the actors, the play also stirred our emotions, including a degree of stress and turmoil as we struggled to do Blythe’s work justice. The demands of reproducing “verbatim” the words and sounds of the real people at the heart of the play were stern enough, but the fact that the musical numbers were also meticulously constructed around the “melody” of each person’s speech patterns made learning the material Charlie Landells