One of the biggest surprises of the 2015 Toronto Film Festival was Rufus Norris’s London Road, which turns an English stage musical about the impact of the Suffolk Strangler murders on a small Ipswich community into a thrillingly cinematic experience.
Just before the film’s Canadian premiere, I sat down with writer Alecky Blythe, composer Adam Cork and director Norris – who’d created the original National Theatre stage production in 2011 and filled the same roles for the film – to discuss the evolution of the project.
London Road began as a stage musical in which characters sang to the audience. The movie is totally cinematic, with no direct-address at all. How did you get there? How did you know it was even possible?
RUFUS NORRIS: You can smell it somehow. It doesn’t mean that you’re right, but it means it’s worth exploring. We immediately shot a lot of stuff, just locally near the theatre, to try and test it out. That didn’t really work, but it did say, “Okay, you need to prod at this a bit.”
How do you create a verbatim musical in the first place? What are the steps?
ADAM CORK: The first step is transcription. Alecky’s first step is to distill something from all the material she’s culled into something she thinks is good to hand over to me, which I can then take on and transcribe in the first instance, note for note and rhythm for rhythm. And then I suppose I bring something underneath to support that. So while those conversational lines – although they’re not anything like conventional verse or lyrics – are unconstrained, they have something underlying them that is rigidly structural and supports them, and justifies their existence as song in a way. I suppose the orchestration side of things grows from there. It’s like decorating a Christmas tree or something. As long as you get things in the right order, you can decorate.
So how much was changed in the adaptation from stage to screen?
CORK: The chronology, which is quite tangled in the stage version, is completely untangled, so it’s told narratively, you know, chronologically from the beginning to end, as it were.
That gives it a perfect three-act structure, which I’m now stunned to discover wasn’t in the stage version.
CORK: [laughs] Well, that’s the other thing, isn’t it? But the whole of the stage version is pretty much direct-address, because it was people talking to Alecky. Alecky’s very cleverly turned some of that into conventional dramatic scenes between people where it’s not to the camera. We still have direct-address moments in the film, but it’s a blend of those two things. It’s a different beast altogether.
NORRIS: Behind the 90 minutes of dialogue she’s got 200 hours [of interviews] in her computer. So any rewrites are going to be as strictly adhered to as the show’s were… and if it comes to it, she has the relationship to go back to the people and get what we need. The residents are our protagonists this is the story of a community that heals itself.
And this should have been my first question, I guess: Alecky, how did you even get them to talk to you?
ALECKY BLYTHE: I’d met Ron and Rosemary, but not the rest of them until six months after the murders happened, when I went back to gauge the temperature of the town before the trial. I got the local paper, and there was a picture of Julia and her hanging baskets and the London Road In Bloom competition. Up until that point, I’d sort of more been just almost talking to anyone who wanted to talk to me in Ipswich – I’d sort of been interviewing everybody. [Julia’s initiative] kind of focused me in on, “Ah, there’s a real story here, because these people are doing something about what happened.” And that’s when I went knocking on lots more doors, and it was easier to talk to them at that time. I had knocked on doors at the time of Steve Wright’s arrest, and Ron and Rosemary were the only ones who’d let me in. It was difficult to get people to talk to me then, but once they’d come together, set up a neighbourhood watch, had their London Road In Bloom competition, they were quite happy to share their story: “Yes, we’ll tell you what we’ve done. This is how awful it was and this is what it’s like now! Come in!”
They’d already established their narrative.
BLYTHE: Yes, exactly. So then I just kept going back over the next two and a half years, and they wanted to put their story out there to re-address, I think, how they felt they’d been presented in the media previously.
What made you think of Olivia Colman for the key role of Julie? She’s an amazing performer, but I would never have imagined her in a musical.
NORRIS: You’ve gotta have somebody who can sing, and obviously it helps that she’s completely brilliant and can attract people to it. Apart from what she’s got to do technically, she’s got to feel like the woman next door. She has to deliver the most devastating line in the play, which means you really have to like her before she does that, to get the correct juxtaposition. It’s crucial to the kind of politics and the message of the piece, which is: Were you in the shoes of these people, living on that road, all your liberal values would be put right up against your instinct to look after your children or to survive the walk home. And we can sit and judge, but the purpose of the story is to ask people to stand in other people’s shoes, and this is a great example of where you go, “It is appalling, what happened to those women.” But why were those women put into that situation? And why were the people of London Road put into that situation, where for 10 years before the murders happened they had to put up with this all the time?
The solicitation on the streets, you mean?
NORRIS: [In the dinner scene] with Julie you really get the detail of it, and it’s horrific. And it would make us – particularly the parents among us – far less reasonable in our political opinions. So to find somebody who can encapsulate all of that, who the audience will love, is really important.
