DVD: London Road

DVD: LONDON ROAD Alecky Blythe's documentary stage musical looks at home on the small screen

Alecky Blythe's documentary stage musical looks at home on the small screen

It’s a long old haul from the MGM musical to London Road. Alecky Blythe’s hugely original account of the murder in 2006 of five sex workers in Ipswich emerged from a set of interviews with local residents. At the National Theatre it grew into a verbatim musical with the addition of Adam Cork’s deftly knitted score. The stage version travelled to the big screen with Rufus Norris directing, and now makes it to the small screen.

London Road

LONDON ROAD Stage hit deepens in transfer to screen

Stage hit deepens in transfer to screen

So many plays and musicals are adapted from films (Bend it Like Beckham is up next) that it comes as something of a throwback to find a film that takes as its source an acclaimed musical play. The sheer fact that there is a movie of London Road is doubly extraordinary when one considers that the widely acclaimed theatre production from 2011 was anomalous even as a stage show, let alone transposed to the screen. A piece of verbatim theatre conceived very much without take-home numbers but scored to the jagged, often discordant music of the composer Adam Cork, London Road seemed to want to shift the landscape of what the musical theatre could look and sound like. So the happy surprise, from this corner at least, is that the film version is even better. 

The writer Alecky Blythe took her tape recorder into the homes of the inhabitants of the Ipswich street that has given the show and now the film its title and was at the epicentre of the shock waves sent out nationally in 2006 when a forklift truck-driver by the name of Steve Wright and from that very road was found guilty of the murder of five prostitutes.

Weaving a skilfully layered mosaic of reaction and response that ranges from sorrow to outrage, paranoia through to something approaching glee (one chap derides the murdered women as "foul-mouthed slags"), Blythe along with Cork and under the ever-watchful eye of Norris offer a portrait of a community under siege that is seen by the end to begin to heal: hanging baskets full of flowers are co-opted for their full metaphoric weight and then some. 

Onstage, in fact, the symbolic heft of the floral abundance was itself a bit, um, florid, and there was scant escaping the impression that we were watching a well-drilled team of actors pretending to be characters and a community that they were not. The performances, however technically accomplished, felt as if they were on the outside looking in, and it was difficult not to detect a whiff of condescension surrounding the enterprise, however inadvertent that surely was. (I remember pondering what Mike Leigh might have done with much the same material.) 

Well, what a difference a shift in genres can make. Making full use of the panoramic possibilities that film allows, Norris has widened out his perspective to up the emotional stakes while also deepening one's sense of an enclave that risks erosion from within faced with the prospect of a murderer in your midst. Norris's prowling camera teases us from the start with the repeated sight of an apparently solitary man, Dodge (Paul Thornley), who acts as a lightning rod for the gathering alarm that is seen to take over the citizenry as a whole. As before, our way into the narrative is via chatty single mum Julie (Olivia Colman, pictured above), whose gradually evident lack of empathy leads to the single most startling line in the piece – a remark, present as well onstage, that is best discovered for oneself. 

Colman is one of several starry additions to the ensemble that performed the play at the National, who have themselves been retained for the movie but sometimes in a smaller role. Lending putative box office wattage is Tom Hardy (pictured left) in a sturdy seven-minute turn as a know-all cabbie quick to emphasise that just because he has made a study of serial killers doesn't mean he is one. And, in an intriguing demotion of sorts that nonetheless plays to her strengths, the Olivier-nominated stage Julie, Kate Fleetwood, here is seen as the hooded representative of the working girls whose lives have been put at risk, her ever-furtive gaze of a piece with the suspicion that looks to be growing far more quickly (at least at first) than any of those necessarily symbolic baskets.

Working with an A-list cinematographer in Danny Cohen (Les Misérables), Norris lends a desaturated visual cool to proceedings whose holiday-time occurrences make for some chilling vignettes all their own: the eerie plastic Santa seen in the stage production reappears here, and there's a startling moment – mordantly funny in tone – during "It Could be Him" (one of the song titles) when mannequins in a men's clothing store become objects of suspicion and scorn. 

This director's confidence behind the camera exponentially amplified since his wildly OTT debut film Broken three years ago, London Road could be subtitled Restored or Made Whole in its climactic implication that those involved find a way forward, albeit at a grievous price: "it took [the prostitutes'] lives for them to help us," as is made clear. And through it all is Cork's insistent, sometimes jarring, always-arresting soundscape that trades in conventional musical theatre uplift for something more quietly forensic, Cork glimpsed near the end as a pianist who catches the Fleetwood character's eye some while after he and his colleagues have caught us in this rewarding film's grip.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for London Road

Broadchurch, Series 2, ITV

BROADCHURCH, SERIES 2, ITV Second coming of the seaside murder saga takes a legalistic turn

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You can see why writers and TV companies like the idea of creating sequels to successful series, but trying to make lightning strike twice has obvious drawbacks. In the case of the original Broadchurch, the runaway ratings blockbuster which ended in April 2013, the story felt so complete and self-contained that the notion of a sequel seemed redundant, or gratuitous.

Locke

LOCKE How can you make a movie this good with just one man, a car and a mobile phone?

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The first line of his Wikipedia entry says that Tom Hardy "is an English actor" (he was born in Hammersmith), but for the 84 minute duration of Locke I was fully prepared to accept that he came from Llangollen or Llareggub. The film's narrative floats on Hardy's warming Welsh brogue like a boat navigating heaving tides and contrary currents, as his character Ivan Locke tries to cope with his life disintegrating around his ears.

Rev, Series 3, BBC Two

REV, SERIES 3, BBC TWO Tom Hollander's Rev Smallbone is a new father in return of altar-com

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Cuban Fury

Nick Frost dances his cares away in an affable-ish romcom with zero ambition

The British romcom is in crisis. Once a pretty reliable source of charm and laughs, these films channelled the spirit of the UK's reliably brilliant sitcoms through the silver screen. Our romantic comedies can be great because we hold no truck with cheesy romance; moments that could be mawkish are undercut by self-deprecation, calamity and even politics. See Hugh Grant's bumbling speech in Four Weddings, the polemical Brassed Off, or Shaun of the Dead which gave us romance with added zombies.

However, recent efforts The Decoy Bride, Not Another Happy Ending, I Give It a Year and About Time have been plain disappointments or mixed bags. Into this climate of prevailing mediocrity comes Cuban Fury - a film with energy, good gags, no time for sentimentality and talent to burn. And still...

Cuban Fury is a film in which a fat chap dances his way into his hot boss's heart and has all the surprises and subtlety that suggests. Nick Frost plays Bruce Garrett, whose childhood history as a champion salsa dancer, bullied into discarding his passion, is unpacked in the time it takes to rattle through the opening credits. We join Bruce in his late thirties to find him overweight, stuck in a romantic rut and working at a firm specialising in industrial machinery. His colleagues are the amusingly indifferent Helen (an underused Alexandra Roach) and the sociopathically obnoxious Drew (Chris O'Dowd).

Bruce's spirits are lifted by the arrival of new manager Julia (Rashida Jones, pictured right) - and when he finds out she salsas, well then it's back on with the dancing shoes. Ian McShane is interestingly cast as a curmudgeonly dance teacher with whom Bruce reconnects, with Olivia Colman reliably lovely as Bruce's excitable sister and Kayvan Novak camping it up as a fellow salsa enthusiast.

Sitcom director James Griffiths's feature debut takes its cue from the energy and visual humour of Edgar Wright but - though his film zips along and is further enlivened by its dance sequences, including a bizarre and entertaining car park dance-off - visually it feels highly derivative, like a poor relation of the aforementioned's Cornetto trilogy. Jon Brown (Misfits and Fresh Meat), who pens the script, proves himself a competent gags man but the plot is hugely predictable, rushed and sometimes illogical (the unprepared-for final dance competition had me slapping my head).

In addition, one of the most frustrating aspects of Cuban Fury is that it moans about how beautiful women are too superficial to find men like Bruce desirable, but fails to acknowledge that, for a long time at least, Bruce has based his infatuation with Julia solely on her looks. And that's what it comes across as, an infatuation - there isn't much in the way of getting to know her, so when Bruce for example compiles a mix-tape, or turns up at Julia's flat it looks extremely creepy and you'll be willing her to get the funk out of there.

This is a story told from a male protagonist's perspective, granted, but it's still a shame that the female lead wasn't allowed much of a personality, especially given Jones' effervescent charm (see Parks and Recreation and the self-penned Celeste & Jesse Forever - much better platforms for her considerable comedic gift). But if Griffiths's first film is significantly flawed, it's far from awful with the likeable cast papering over some pretty hefty cracks to keep things predominantly amusing. Cuban Fury is undemanding, toe-tapping fluff which just about passes muster as an evening's entertainment and which works best (and only) if you savour the gags and switch your brain to unquestioning acceptance for the remainder. Meanwhile the wait continues for the next great British romcom.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Cuban Fury

The 7.39, BBC One

THE 7.39, BBC ONE David Nicholls's pretty suburbanites fail to smoulder convincingly

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There are times us northerners watch your typical London-set big-budget BBC drama and think, well, this really is another world. Whether it’s the two-hour commutes or the estate agencies where there is so much business that nobody has time to sit and watch cat videos on YouTube, there’s little about the world of The 7.39 familiar to those of us lacking three-bedroom semi-detached suburbia and a job in the City.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: The Murder in Angel Lane, ITV

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The disgraced ex-cop turned private investigator has become such a trope of contemporary noir that the fate of the first great modern detective, following the events of his first televised outing, is not particularly surprising. The Murder in Angel Lane has Paddy Considine reprise his 2011 role as the titular detective, but this time the mystery he is charged with solving has sprung entirely from the pen of Appropriate Adult’s Neil McKay rather than being inspired by true-life events.

I Give It a Year

I GIVE IT A YEAR Dan Mazer's debut skips the schmaltz and goes straight for the comic jugular

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Although I Give It a Year seems to have more than a whiff of a Richard Curtis rom-com about it, don’t be fooled as this is the debut of British writer-director Dan Mazer, the co-writer of the emphatically more outré Brüno and Borat, along with various incarnations of Ali G. Furthermore he’s lobbed Scary Movie's Anna Faris and Bridemaids' Rose Byrne into the mix.

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