Theatre review: Cable Street

The 1936 Battle of Cable Street in East London is known as the biggest anti-fascist protest on British soil. It's a piece of English history that can still be looked back on with pride at a time when most re-examinations of the past don't see it hold up too well, so it remains a popular subject. It also marks a significant moment of unity between the Jewish and Irish communities that until then might not have necessarily been on the same side, so there are bound to be many people in both those modern-day communities who have personal family stories about it. Which is all to say that when Southwark Playhouse put Tim Gilvin (music & lyrics) and Alex Kanefsky's (book) musical premiere Cable Street on sale it sold out the entire run before it had even opened, an impressive enough feat at the moment for an Off West End show with no star casting.

So Cable Street is a hit off the back of its title alone, but does the treatment do it justice? That's where I was less sure. While other far right leaders gain power in Europe, Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists try to stir up sentiment against Jews, the Irish and Communists, riling up young unemployed men by blaming these groups for the economy's problems.

In the East End some of these tensions are felt between the groups, with the Jewish and Irish communities largely staying apart and hostile (the Communists try to bring everyone together but their efforts are too specifically focused on the Spanish Civil War to register with people worried about threats at home.) Kanefsky's story follows a large ensemble of characters from every demographic and political viewpoint, but is centred around a West Side Story central romance between Jewish Sammy (Joshua Ginsberg) and Mairaid (Sha Dessi, one of the show's standouts,) who as a Communist of Irish descent who works in a Jewish bakery, has links to pretty much everyone.

Sammy has one of the Communists (Ethan Pascal Peters) hovering over his shoulder encouraging him to join up in Spain pretty much throughout, so he basically has "doomed" written all over him in crayon. Meanwhile Sammy's neighbour Ron (Danny Colligan) has moved from Lancashire to London for work and, finding none, has become an easy target for the BUF to recruit. And in a present-day framing device of an East End walking tour, the show suggests the history of Cable Street as a better alternative to the ubiquitous, problematic Jack the Ripper tours that famously infest the area.

There's a lot to like here, but Gilvin and Kanefsky's writing had an unfortunate ability to take me right out of the show just as I was starting to get into it (as do some of the more... interesting choices in Jevan-Howard Jones' choreography.) A lot of this comes down to musical style - I'm probably not the only one who thought the theme focusing on these two communities might give us riffs on Jewish and Irish traditional music, and it's probably for the best that we don't get that, but instead Gilvin's style is steeped in musical theatre of the last 50 or so years. For the most part we get numbers that are broadly or specifically reminiscent of certain composers or songs, but where one composer's concerned the influence is a bit too on-the-nose.

Obviously Hamilton has been the most influential musical of the last decade, with many British shows trying to replicate its irreverent take on history, but nowhere as on-the-nose as with the hip-hop numbers here. Ginsberg is the only actor required to actually rap, and the idea of turning a sparky young Jewish ex-boxer in the 1930s into a rapper is a fun one. But every rhythm, phrasing and cadence Gilvin gives him to perform is so unmistakeably Lin-Manuel Miranda that I spent much of the first act wondering how long it'll be before 10 to 4 Productions get a phone call from some lawyers.

There are some clumsy moments in the dialogue that also took me out of the moment - "I can't find my bastard fags or my bastard lighter." "It's 2 o'clock in t'bastard morning!" (Mummy, I think they might be Northerners.) But all things told Kanefsky doesn't do a bad job of marshalling the multiple storylines and characters vying for attention. Not to mention the cast of Adam Lenson's production, most of whom are jumping between characters in various communities - at one point Jez Unwin is Jewish, Irish and Fascist father figures in the same song, possibly in the same verse.

Also there's a cardboard War Horse

Yoav Segal's set has a grungy grandeur that reflects the industrial jobs many of these people had, and in the present-day scenes Debbie Chazen's American tourist joins the walking tour midway then keeps interrupting the guide to read out some poetry she thinks might be of interest. I don't want to stereotype but I have a feeling one or two London tour guides might recognise that character. There's lots of energy and lots of good work being done here, but the way the show struggles to find its own musical identity - or, when it does, it's someone else's - was one of the things that meant I couldn't entirely lose myself in the action. I was too busy wondering how the show would go down if it was staged somewhere that didn't have the same kind of connection to the actual story.

Cable Street by Tim Gilvin and Alex Kanefsky is booking until the 16th of March at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Large Theatre (returns only.)

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Jane Hobson.