Alecky Blythe’s award-winning 2011 verbatim musical London Road has raised the stock of her more standard verbatim plays, in which actors wearing headphones reproduce not only the exact words but the timing and intonation of real-life interviewees. She can now boast a cast which few if any of her earlier pieces would have attracted, including Ronni Ancona, Imogen Stubbs and the RSC’s imminent first black Iago Lucian Msamati as well as a “community chorus” of more than 30.
    
Yet this should have been an earlier piece. It is culled principally from recordings taken during and immediately after the riots of August 2011: Blythe put herself and her Dictaphone on the streets of Hackney amid some of the greatest unrest of that turbulent summer. The stage edit – to just over 80 minutes – focuses on the campaign to restore Siva Kandiah’s destroyed newsagent’s shop, a symbol for a particular local community. However, that community itself is split between the deprived and oppressed Pembury estate on one side of the road and better-off Clapton Square on the other. When Tony and Sarah in the square kick off their campaign, with the best will in the world, their kitchen meetings resemble a middle-class north London soviet. But if Blythe and director Joe Hill-Gibbins do not spare such folk, neither do they give her an easy time herself: Blythe is played by Blythe, complete with sometimes inane questions and embarrassed, embarrassing giggles.
    
This is not the first verbatim drama to come out of the riots: Gillian Slovo’s play simply called The Riots was seen at the Tricycle within weeks of the events. Blythe’s recordings of those directly involved and living in the area seem to offer no more answers than Slovo’s focus on bigger social and political names, but no fewer either. When considering why this particular flame of disorder caught, the same puzzlement covers Slovo’s government ministers and Blythe’s neighbours. Perhaps Colin the philosophical barber (played by Msamati) comes closest when he coins the title phrase.
    
Another puzzle is why this work should appear now after the raw material had been sitting on the shelf for three years. It feels rather as if the Almeida is not just involving itself with current(ish) affairs much as the Tricycle has been, but firing a calculated if modest pre-election broadside. None of which detracts from the theatrical and civic quality of the result.
    
Written for the Financial Times.