Tom Hardy is shaken by the murders in London Road.
Occupying the most improbable of genres, the musical thriller, this feature-film version of a 2011 National Theatre hit takes an unusual angle of view to explore the effect on the small Ipswich street of the title of a wave of murders in 2006.
The killer lived in the street, it
turned out. But even before he was caught, writer Alecky Blythe recorded interviews with locals about their reactions to the killings of five women, all of whom had been working as prostitutes.
She developed their answers into a script, using the techniques of verbatim theatre, in which real speech is reproduced, with all its hesitations and ellipses. Large slabs of the text were then set to music by composer Adam Cork so cast members, solo or in dramatic massed unison, sing many lines.
If that sounds artificial, it's because it is, but it rewards the viewer prepared to ease into it. The melodic tropes it deploys are less those of the musical than of the oratorio - the particular style is what composers call recitative - and you certainly won't be humming any of the tunes on the way home.
But the muted theatricality brings things into focus by putting us at a distance from them. It's the exact opposite of the lip-smackingly explicit and grisly tabloid reportage that is the normal mode of delivery for these stories and it's strikingly revealing.
