London Road

The Independent“The result is an alive and richly flavoured text...” This production is one of the most exciting experimental pieces the National has ever presented, and it surely marks the start of an important collaboration between Cork and Blythe...

Financial Times“Neither sensationalist nor insensitive…” But if the piece is to be honest, that’s necessary. And for all the words and music, the piece is most powerful when three sex workers giving their testimonies simply fall into a prolonged, painful silence...

Time Out“A powerful, beautiful and unsettling articulation…” But the real brilliance of Blythe and Cork's musical is its troubling portrayal of community as an entity. Individually, the 11 central characters and 52 additional interviewees channelled by the cast are a diverse bunch...

The Stage“Disturbing and surprising, haunting and harrowing…” Brought to a quite thrillingly inhabited personal life by a superb ensemble cast of 11 actors, who play one main character each plus 52 other parts between them across the evening, this is an innovative and challenging show...

Whatsonstage.com“A really worthwhile, home-grown, experimental piece...” It all amounts to the most genuinely interesting and innovative new musical I’ve seen for ages and cures me of my usual aversion to Alecky Blythe’s method of having actors repeat exactly what they are hearing in their ear phones...

Guardian“There are moments when the inarticulacy gets frustrating…” But Blythe's treatment, in Rufus Norris's beautifully performed production, does reveal to us types of lived experience that drama often avoids: the passers-by inconvenienced by major crimes, the locals thrilled to star in a national news event…

The Telegraph“The show is excellent too...” The whole concept might sound deeply dodgy, but somehow it works, combining humour and compassion with what Wordsworth called “the still sad music of humanity”...

this is london“A startling, magically original success....” It is a subtle and affecting work - a tribute to the possibilities of the National Theatre Studio, in which playwrights and composers are brought together in unlikely conjunctions...