There is plenty still to say about the riots of August 2011, but I left Alecky Blythe’s new verbatim show with a stronger sense of how the show itself was put together than I was of the fractured community it depicts.
Blythe is an old hand at talking to communities in crisis, most famously when her field recordings during the Ipswich serial murders became the musical London Road (soon to be a film). Here, at first, she does a brilliant job of outlining her unusual process. Playing herself, she addresses a community group to explain that she is assembling a show about the riots in Hackney, east London. Actors will wear earpieces feeding them lines she recorded. They will reproduce everything they hear: “Accent, delivery, coughs, stutters, sneezes.”
Little Revolution goes on to divide its time between Blythe’s encounters with rioters on the streets of Hackney, people from local estates and the middle-class campaigners who come to the aid of Siva, a grocer whose shop was looted. Performed in the round, Joe Hills-Gibbins’s production has some arresting moments, especially one clamorous one when looters run through the aisles. However, unlike the broad-ranging verbatim account of the riots staged by the Tricycle theatre in late 2011, this gonzo depiction is limited to what Blythe sees in person. And, notwithstanding the moment when a rioter confronts her as she is taking pictures, she remains on the fringes.
She shows us frissons between campaigners; Siva’s reluctance to become the “important symbol” they want him to be; the youth who tells Blythe to turn off her Dictaphone. Yet the emphasis on verisimilitude means that too much emphasis is placed on characters’ quirks of speech rather than their actions or views. And while Blythe shows no vanity in reproducing her own ingratiating guffaws, the number of references people make to her or to the show make Little Revolution feel too enthralled by its own process.
The best moments allow us to forget how they were come by. A scintillating scene shows us a black man taking on the police on the intricacies of stop-and-search protocols. The white mum of a mixed-race boy tells how he was remanded on “no evidence whatsoever”. A campaigner clashes politely with a youth-group leader who is all for stop and search.
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It’s beautifully played throughout. Ronnie Ancona, Imogen Stubbs, Michael Shaeffer, Rufus Wright, Rez Kempton, Lloyd Hutchinson and Lucian Msamati — just announced as the RSC’s first black Iago — are among a first-rate cast of 11 aided by non-professional locals in smaller parts. There are some fine moments, but Little Revolution needs to get out of its own way more.
Box office: 020-7359 4404, to Oct 4