The far right on the streets, an agenda-filled press and a nation caught in a cost-of-living crisis being encouraged to blame immigrants for its woes. It’s not hard to see why this new musical – set in the lead-up to and aftermath of the real-life 1936 stand against the march of Oswald Mosley’s black-shirt fascists by the residents of Cable Street in London’s East End – resonates so powerfully now.
Written by Alex Kanefsky, with music and lyrics by Tim Gilvin and directed by Adam Lenson, it’s at Marylebone Theatre following two runs at Southwark Playhouse in 2024. Told in flashback via a present-day tour of Cable Street, it follows the fatefully linked lives of Irish Mairead (Lizzy-Rose Esin-Kelly), who dreams of being a poet while supporting her family, Jewish ex-boxer Sammy (Isaac Gryn), for whom faith isn’t enough in the face of bigotry, and Northerner Ron (Barney Wilkinson), whose desperation at the lack of work is manipulated into racism and violence.
Esin-Kelly’s Mairead is a charismatic, no-nonsense presence, while Gryn shades her would-be love interest Sammy with a bruising anger. Wilkinson plays Ron as someone lost and dangerously confounded by harsh reality. There’s some excellent work from the rest of the ensemble cast, who bring to life their families, neighbours, Mosley’s sneering thugs and the ineffectual police. Lenson ensures that these characters are impactful threads in the social tapestry.
There are shades of Les Misérables when this social tinderbox inevitably ignites and barricades go up on Cable Street. But what makes Kanefsky’s book and Gilvin’s songs so affecting is that they never lose sight of the intimate, human tragedy – hardworking neighbours and a rich mix of migrant families caught up in the sewage of fascism and struggling to see why British Communists are focusing on Spain when they’re simply trying to cope with rent increases and the threat of eviction.
Gilvin’s music is by turns adrenalin-filled and propulsive – mixing the beats of brash ’90s pop and the rhythms of traditional Jewish music – and mournfully evocative. From the encroaching ominousness of ‘With Enough Pressure’ to the sad-eyed ‘Stranger/Sister’ and elegiac ‘Happening Again’, it’s as multi-layered as the community to which it gives a voice. The score captures the cycle of protest and unity that knits together the show’s message that crisis is always on the horizon but so is solidarity.
Like the splintered, ill-fitting rafters that frame designer Yoav Segal’s set, this production wisely avoids a tidy ending. Instead, its clear-sighted sense of the high stakes of history is what makes it so deeply moving.
