Cable Street @ Southwark Playhouse Elephant - Review
A cheesy, charming, charming and honest musical about East London. ★★★★
At Southwark Playhouse Elephant until 10th October.
Tickets from £25.
Rating: ★★★★
Cable Street was bold and timely when it last ran early this year, but after a late summer of racial violence and bold, inspiring resistance to fascism, it feels even more like a story of our time.
The musical focuses on the Battle of Cable Street, a clash between Mosley’s fascists and East End residents in the 1930s. It is set in an unclear amount of time before and after, but the temporality doesn’t matter much. There’s a trio of main characters leading parallel and intertwined lives, with the rest of the cast multi-rolling. It comes with a pleasing frame narrative of an East End walking tour, well used to provide exposition but not to it’s full effect.
Our main characters are Mairead (Sha Dessi), a young Irish immigrant, committed to communism; Sammy (Joshua Ginsberg), an underemployed british Jew; and Ron (Danny Colligan), from the north of England and increasingly desperate for work to support his mother. They live in the same working class tenement block, all with their families, and become more acquainted throughout the course of the play. They are all developed enough to be loveable and sympathetic, an impressive feat in a single musical.
The music of Cable Street is incredible, impressively varied while maintaining a consistent, contemporary and loosely Irish-folky, sound, and unabashedly celebratory of Cable Street and the East End. Excellent use is made of the large cast with a diverse range as a chorus. It is slightly reminiscent of Hamilton at times, with a protagonistic who speaks fast over music, but not unpleasantly. Some of the non-musical writing is fantastic, the Fascist and Communist speeches and the walking tour shine, but the often falls down when a flamboyant, over-acting cast and an in-your-face writing style clash with an attempt at naturalism. The blatant ethnic stereotypes and accents are charming in songs, far less so in intimate living room conversation. There is also a tendency to over-explain, including at times having characters just explain what has happened on stage, which can break the flow and occasionally push it from charming to cringe.
The plot is well done, a human exploration of British resistance against fascism and the power of communities coming together. It does very well in it’s portrayal of fascists, making justified fun of them without downplaying their appeal to vulnerable men or the danger they pose to communities. It could do a better job of unpicking the role of the police in upholding power- police are frequently featured but fairly one-dimensionally brutal. One must give it real credit for accurately portraying the crucial role of communists in antifascism, and for truthfully portraying the extent of antisemitism in pre-war Britain.
None of the acting is bad, but some of it particularly shines. Colligan is the greatest of the leads, his portrayal of desperation and the spiral into fascist indoctrination is sympathetically played without being apologetic; a worse actor could have made the role much more hateable. Jez Unwin demonstrates a fantastic range, from fascist leader to devout Jewish father in seconds. Ethan Pascal Peters has a hilarious minor role as a musical Daily Mail newsie, his mannerisms perfectly capture the viscious nationalism we expect from the paper.
The costuming is unremarkable in a good way, versatile and understated in a so that it facilitates the multi-roling and fast pace. The staging similarly makes very good use of a small amount of domestic furniture, shared between the families and used in the barricade it is a powerful visual metaphor. The inherent features of the staging are also very charming, allowing us to see the musicians throughout.
While the comparison is overdone at this point, Cable Street really dose have Hamilton energy. A joyful, unabashedly celebratory, patriotic, modern musical history lesson about complicated humans that occasionally tips over into cringe. It’s absolutely worth seeing live, the recorded soundtrack doesn’t do it justice.
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