London Road (2015): ***

London Road tends to raise some eyebrows when it is described; it’s a musical about the Ipswich murders. However, the focus is squarely on how this event affected the residents on London Road, where serial killer Steve Wright lived briefly whilst he committed his murderous acts. As the police and journalist flurry towards their street, the residents struggle to process what is going on and find themselves trapped on their road. After Wright’s arrest, the residents start to reach out to each other to connect and build a stronger community amongst themselves. 

For anyone not familiar with London Road, which was created at The National Theatre in London before being adapted for the screen, it’s not your usual musical. All the dialogue is verbatim, collected by Aleckly Blythe over three years from the residents of Ipswich and news reporters, and set to music by Adam Cork. As such, every ‘err’, ‘umm’ and stumble are replicated exactly in the songs, although Cork uses selected lines to create motifs within each song. Lines like ‘It’s a wicked, bloody world’ and ‘Dressed in a black suit, white shirt and blue tie’ are repeated, sung in the round and are rearranged, creating these mesmerising moments out of mundane speech in the most powerful songs. Some songs don’t quite have the same impact, due to either losing their immediacy in their transferal onscreen or cannot quite sustain their momentum and quality. However, even in the less successful songs, there are some impactful moments within them. Javier de Frutos provides some syncopated movement sequences as Ipswich residents live in fear, dropping their bags to look around nervously, and later surge in morbid curiosity to catch a glimpse of Steve Wright’s face. Danny Cohen’s cinematography consists of long tracking shots, extreme close-ups and static shots of the residents watching their street on the television. The colour palette is mostly greys and blues as the winter and the investigation draws around the street. As the community comes together from their street party, it becomes bright and sunny in a somewhat mawkish stylistic choice for the conclusion. 

The London Road residents have the admirable goal of creating a better community and reconnecting with their neighbours in the light of the tragedy. However, the majority of the residents are extremely unsympathetic to the point of anger. Julie (Olivia Colman) sings about her frustrations with the sex workers and how she would like to meet Wright, ‘…I’d love to shake his hand and say, “Thank you very much for getting rid of them”’. Another resident cheerfully informs a policeman that, ‘I wouldn’t give £50 to a scaggy little whore’. There’s something perverse in watching a community toast to the arrest of Wright and hold a garden competition to improve their image, hiding the problem of drug addiction and prostitution behind their hanging baskets. London Road seems to be more about the prevailing conservative attitudes towards sex workers amongst the middle class. Director Rufus Norris fails to make the Ipswich residents empathetic for the audience, as the resident’s gripes and frustrations pale in comparison to the loss of five lives.

Norris, to his credit, does make an effort to offer some pointed commentary on these goings-on. As Julie is making her unpleasant remarks, her daughter is shown curled away from her with her face hidden. Whilst London Road is in full bloom and bursting with flowers, only a few flowers line the steps of the courthouse where Wright is convicted, the victims solely mourned by their families. Vicky (Kate Fleetwood) haunts London Road to pay her respects to her deceased friends and is part of a trio of sex workers who sing, ‘We’ve All Stopped Now’ in their only scene together, which turns out to be the film’s most poignant scene. When London Road was first announced, many were suspicious of the National Theatre capitalising on the tragedy and the production was decried by several family members of the victims. I don’t think this is the case, instead, if anything, London Road never properly examines how the Ipswich murders affected the women most affected by the events, keeping the sex workers on the periphery of the film. 

London Road is an ensemble piece, originally staged with a cast of eleven performing over seventy roles. The cast consists of the original members of the stage production reprising one of their roles in the film. Two new additions come in the form of Olivia Colman and Tom Hardy. Olivia Colman gives a good performance, although not her strongest, as Julie who helps to rally the street together. Colman also possessed a rather pleasant singing voice, which lends itself well to the film. Tom Hardy has a brief cameo as a taxi driver with a morbid fascination with serial killers, providing some darkly funny moments. His singing style was strangely reminiscent of Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd, but not unenjoyable. 

London Road is a competent musical adaptation, although some of the music’s power is lost onscreen and the unsympathetic characters may be off-putting.