Inspired by Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz, James Graham has brought together eight previously unproduced writers to provide a dramatic mosaic of London life. The stories are interwoven rather than being separately staged and, while the result is a bit of a hodge-podge, the final impression is of a beautiful city at any moment on the point of collapse.
Graham himself is a contributor as well as a dramaturg and, unsurprisingly, his pieces stand out. One, exploring the relationship between a mayoral speechwriter and the girl he has lost, is like a romcom with a savage bite: another, showing an ex-prisoner plotting to release the ravens in the Tower and bring the internet crashing down, offers a vision of apocalypse with a happy ending. What comes across most strongly, however, is the idea of London as a place of gregarious solitude and imminent danger. I was especially struck by Alan Gordon’s story of a fraught Falkirk-born drag-queen, by Himanshu Ojha’s account of a trawl through the sewers to discover the source of a severed hand and by Sumerah Srivastav’s chilling portrait of a second-hand shopkeeper who turns out to be a sex trafficker.
I wished some stories, especially one about a revolution of the underpaid sparked by mutinous stage-doorkeepers, had been followed through and cohesion is hard to achieve with so many varied voices. Thomas Hescott’s production, however, keeps the action moving, and the designs by Ellan Parry and Daniel Denton (video) evoke everything from the upper reaches of Westminster Abbey to a suburban garden with a skeletal elegance.
The five actors – Samuel James, Penny Layden, Nav Sidhu, Sean Michael Verey and Sophie Wu – also do a remarkable job of playing multiple characters often distinguished by nothing more than a change of hat. The show catches something of the oddity, excess and hidden terrors of modern London, but nothing is quite as potent as Dickens who, in the little-read Sketches by Boz, typically says of the city at daybreak on a summer morning that “the stillness of death is over the streets”.
• At Wilton’s Music Hall until 27 October
