Frankie Fox is Liam (left with bag) in Boy at the Almeida Theatre. Photograph: Kwame Lestrade
Cut-outs of Billy Elliot, the working class boy who defies the odds to fulfil his dancing dreams dangle tauntingly above the Almeida stage during Leo Butler’s haunting new play.
Below, director-designer team Sacha Wares and Miriam Buether bring to life the mean streets of London in a way that calls foul the Billy Elliot myth of social mobility.
The stage is a slow-moving circular conveyor belt, filled at the start by the huge cast of mostly unknown actors. School children wait at the bus stop, a man talks loudly on his phone, and random snatches of dialogue overlap to give a sense of the urban melee.
As actors hop off the conveyor belt to reappear later on as different characters, one face in the crowd remains. Liam (newcomer Frankie Fox) is 17, has dropped out of education and faces an uncertain future.
Without money, qualifications or a supportive family, Liam is ill-equipped for life in austerity-era London. “You don’t know much, Steven,” says his friend’s mother, getting his name wrong. Fox is excellent as Liam, his eyes sunken, his body language uncertain and apologetic, his speech confused.
We follow Liam for a day as he trudges through the streets of London in his grey tracksuit and plastic rucksack. On the trail of a friend, Liam’s odyssey across London is fruitless from the start. He gets in trouble for not having a ticket on the tube, and one particularly grim moment sees him down and out, eating fried chicken in the cubicle of a public toilet.
Reaching Oxford Street, giant letters spelling out the name of the sportswear chain Sports Direct fill the stage. It’s a nightmare vision of consumerist Britain, and Liam lacks the tools to cope with any of it, as he struggles to articulate his sense of alienation from mainstream society.
With a roll call of bit-part characters, Boy is a somewhat disjointed play but the production by Miriam Buether and Sacha Wares raises it to the level of brilliant drama. Their perpetually looping stage brings to life a bleak vision of London, featuring everything from Oyster barriers to self-service checkouts.
Following Alecky Blythe’s Little Revolution and Re: Home by Cressida Brown, Boy is the latest play to focus on growing levels of inequality in the capital. But what makes Boy the most disturbing of the bunch is that is it neither blames nor offers redemption.
Hackney-based playwright Alecky Blythe is one of the UK’s leading verbatim theatre practitioners, with her plays created from real dialogue and real life events. Last year she used it to great effect in Little Revolution, about the London Riots. Now she is involved in a film adaptation of her greatest triumph to date, the acclaimed musical London Road, about the serial murders of five sex workers in Ipswich in 2006.
What drew you to this dark story?
At the time I was collecting material for my film The Girlfriend Experience – the women were saying I should go to Ipswich, because that’s where the story was. Eventually I did, in case I found anything I could use. It was so interesting, so dynamic. It was an extraordinary time that people just wanted to talk about. For ages the material sat on my shelf. I returned for the trial 18 months later to gauge the temperature, and that’s when I found out about London Road in Bloom, a flower competition residents were running. My focus then became specific, and London Road became central to the story. It was one that hadn’t yet been told, about a community coming together to heal itself.
What you do on the stage is very innovative. How does it translate to film?
The big challenge is that film is more visual. Verbatim is by its nature wordy, so it was my intention to consciously pick up active material on the street. I spoke to people when they were shopping, or at work, though I still did have to invent scenes and create a different type of stage direction. In film, viewers want to indulge their visual sense, so I tried to tackle that.
How important was it to you that the killer had no part in the film?
I didn’t want that to be the focus. I wasn’t asking about him or the women in my interviews; verbatim isn’t gossip, it’s about how people are affected. I wanted to know what it was like living on the same street as a serial killer, and people responded well to that. They didn’t want to talk about sensationalist stuff, they just wanted to offload.
Why do you think music works so well in London Road?
I’d always wanted to make a musical. In my play Cruising, there’s a scene where a couple dance a waltz to Stevie Wonder. It’s such a relief from all the talking, and it gave me the idea to make a verbatim piece with music for release. Later, I attended a workshop at the National Theatre with several writers and composers. I took some stuff to experiment with – material I’d collected at the time of the Ipswich murders. The composer Adam Cork and I just found that music worked so well with the interviews of scared women and chivalrous men. They were bitty and fragmented, but the music glued them together and enriched the subject matter. Adam was so brilliant, so forensic with the detail that there was a real joy in the challenge of lifting the speech. We found originality in the patterns.
How do you think people endure this kind of event?
Through coming together. Cultural and social boundaries don’t matter in an extraordinary situation. Friendship and connecting in a shared experience is what got them through. The people of Ipswich dared to go out and found that, through awful circumstances, they connected. It’s a commonality in all my work.
What do you hope viewers take away from this?
Ultimately it is uplifting. There’s a bittersweet ending. These people now have friendship and each other, and a community that looks out for them. I want viewers to take away the power of community.
Riot act: Alecky Blythe and Clare Perkins rehearse for Little Revolution. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
Alecky Blythe’s play Little Revolution about the Hackney Riots ends its run at the Almeida early this month, though we might not have seen the last of it. It’s been suggested that the play should come to Hackney, a move that would at least mean more of the people the play is about will get to see it.
And the play is certainly worth seeing, both for what it says and how it says it. Much has been made of Blythe’s verbatim method; the playwright ventured out during the riots three years ago, going as far as Wolverhampton, interviewing people and searching for material that could form the basis of a dramatic work.
As it happens, Hackney resident Blythe found her focus for Little Revolution closer to home. She witnessed the looting of Siva Kandiah’s shop on Clarence Road, and returning the next day discovered that a group had been set up to help the riot-stricken shopkeeper.
“When I went back I met Tony and Sarah, who told me they were setting up a campaign, and that they’d seen the show that I had on at the time, London Road. I could see I had access to a forward development, a narrative, and that there were people here getting together trying to do something about what had happened. So that’s why I focused in on Hackney.”
What does the play bring to light about Hackney? As the play alternates between scenes of rioting, the work of campaign group Stop Criminalising Hackney Youth, and an incongruous- seeming plan to hold a community tea party, a more nuanced picture of Hackney begins to emerge.
“I think the show brings to light the sort of simmering class tensions that are probably quite prevalent in more and more parts of London with increasing gentrification,” says Blythe.
For Blythe the riots were a catalyst that opened her eyes up to class tension and division. “My play is trying to do something about it, whether it succeeds or fails. The community tea party tries to do something about it, Stop Criminalising Hackney Youth is trying to do something about it. It’s about people trying to connect and maybe misfiring.”
The idea of recording real people then getting actors to speak their words surely makes Blythe’s relationship to her material more complex than the norm. What if one of the characters comes to see the play and takes offence, or claims they’re being misrepresented? “I’m always very, very nervous,” Blythe admits. But I try to explain to people that it’s not a biography of their lives, that I’m a dramatist. Yes it’s their real words but they were edited, and I tried to be up front as much as possible with those central characters.”
When I caught a Saturday evening performance, the character of Councillor Ian Rathbone was a constant source of laughter, while newsagent Siva found himself patronised at every turn by his middle class benefactors. I ask Blythe whether she’s received much feedback from the people themselves.
“Councillor Rathbone absolutely loved it and wants us to take it to Hackney,” she answers. “And Siva I think found it very moving. Being in it, I spotted him in the audience. Of course I started to think it must be so traumatic for him, and that maybe this was a bad idea. But he loved it and said he was moved to tears.”
Little Revoultion is not Blythe’s first play about Hackney. Her play-writing debut was with Come Out Eli, about the Hackney Siege of 2002. At the time she was another struggling actor, and wrote the play essentially to get work.
In each of her plays Blythe has used the verbatim method of play-writing she discovered at a workshop at the Actors’ Centre 12 years ago. Given that each character is real and the meticulous care taken with dialogue, it’s tempting to call Little Revolution a rewitnessing of the events of August 2011. Blythe points out, however, that while realistic, the play has been shaped through what she saw.
“I’m telling it how it happened but through my eyes. One of the criticisms is there are not enough voices of the rioters or of the youth. The show illustrates how I tried, but those voices are really difficult to capture. People are responding to a white middle class woman – they would respond differently to a young black male. It’s a very personal thing, how I engage with people and how they engage with me, and whether they choose to or not.”
‘Community’ is at the centre of Little Revolution, attested by the Community Chorus, a crew of local volunteers that – it should be said – integrates seamlessly into the professional cast. These bystanders, rioters and residents are ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. One wonders how many of these indirect real life subjects of the play have seen or know about it.
“Rupert [Goold, the Almeida’s new artistic director] was keen to reach out to a broader audience, and the theatre has been doing first time tickets for five pounds,” Blythe informs me.
Blythe sees no problem with the propensity of “middle class voices” in the play; she says it is as much about these middle class voices “trying to reach out to the other side of the street”.
“I don’t think theatre can change things greatly,” she adds. “But I do think it can get people talking about things. If people come out of the theatre talking about these issues then I think that’s great because it’s made them think about it in a different way.”
Little Revolution is at the Almeida Theatre, Almeida Street, N1 1TA until 4 October.
