Review: CABLE STREET at Marylebone Theatre

We open with a present day walking tour of the East End with its mix of curious tourists and those who just want to hear about Victorian pestilence and the more salacious details of Jack the Ripper’s terrorisation of impoverished local prostitutes. The tour is conducted by local resident Steve (Jez Unwin) who later morphs — as do all cast members — into other characters, in his case Mick the de facto leader of the local branch of Black Shirts and as Yitzhak, the peace loving father of the Scheinberg family whose wayward son Sammy (Isaac Gryn) has a penchant for boxing and develops an attachment to Irish gal Mairead Kenny (Lizzy-Rose Esin Kelly). Their neighbour Ron Williams (Barney Wilkinson) has moved down from the north of England and lives with his sick mother. Like most working class poor, all he wants is a job to earn money to look after those nearest to him. The Fascists’ rallying call of putting Britain first by demonising Jews and other foreign stealers of jobs, eventually strikes a chord with him in his perpetual state of unemployment and he finds himself in opposition to those he lives alongside on Cable Street. As the drying-up of jobs coincides with increasing rents and families being forcibly evicted by slum landlords, (where the police merely act as brutal facilitators), the various disparate community factions eventually realise that they must unite to enforce a stand-off.

As if to reinforce London’s variety and lack of any single homogeneous grouping, the creators have deployed many and varied musical styles to offer something of an eclectic mish-mash of tunes and segues, ranging from Sammy’s multiple hip-hop outlines to Yitzhak’s beautifully sensitive cautionary tale Only Words which brought the house down on press night.

In general I’m not a fan of musicals which allow singers to trill excessively or require the repeated hitting of stratospheric notes in a bid to convince audience members that they are exceptionally gifted performers delivering the songs of exceptionally gifted writers. We came close on a couple of occasions, but thankfully in her turn as Elizabeth Warner (and as Ron’s mother Edie), Preeya Kalidas knew when to rein-in and control delivery. Barney Wilkinson too managed to stay the right side of excess, despite the rock tenor requirements of the Rooftop Sequence in which Sammy initiates a showdown following the devastating assault on his brother Moishe (Ethan Pascal Peters). There’s solid character work too from Romona Lewis-Malley as his sister Rosa, and Natalie Elisha-Welsh as his mother Rachel, but final honours go to pink-haired Debbie Chazen as Kathleen Kenny and Oonagh the American tourist searching her mum’s old haunts.

As if to highlight the comically divergent viewpoints of the time (which perhaps bear more than a passing resemblance to our own rabid news sources), four newspaper sandwich boards appear regularly to espouse their owner’s take on events of the day as The Times, The Jewish Chronicle, The Daily Worker and the perpetually rabid Daily Mail. Some things never change and perhaps the message of the show, is that some lessons are never learned.

CABLE STREET continues at Marylebone Theatre until 28th Feb and has a running time of 2 hrs 25mins including interval.