Music and Lyrics: Tim Gilvin
Book: Alex Kanefsky
Director: Adam Lenson
Far-right fascists blame immigrants for the country’s woes. Economic hardship and political disenchantment create room for extremist groups with charismatic leaders. This painfully familiar tale is set in London’s smoky East End in 1936. Inspired by Hitler and Mussolini, Oswald Mosley forms the British Union of Fascists (BUF), and his blackshirts are marching.
Cable Street is a dynamic and timely musical with songs by Tim Gilvin and book by Alex Kanefsky. It premiered in 2024 to a packed Southwark Playhouse and is now at Marylebone Theatre with a mix of old cast and new. The show is framed by a contemporary walking tour of the East End, exploring the area’s many-layered multicultural history. American visitor Oonagh (fabulously versatile, Olivier-nominated Debbie Chazen) is trying to find out more about her mother’s life here. Tour guide Steve (similarly protean Jez Unwin) reads extracts from the diary of his great uncle Sammy, who was living in Cable Street in the 1930s, prompting the musical’s action to shift back in time.
Young Sammy is played by Isaac Gryn with lithe physicality, leaping effortlessly on and off tables and shimmying into raging action. It’s one of several strong performances in a piece of fabulous ensemble stagecraft. A luminous Lizzy-Rose Esin-Kelly plays Irish poet and beigel-bakery worker Mairead, who urges local drinkers to find new songs for new times: “’Cos these are our dirty cobbles, our corner of the river, / far away from Dublin’s fair city…” She marshals the pub’s guitar and fiddle-players into a foot-stomping call to action: “What now? What next?”
Tim Gilvin’s impressive music draws on eclectic influences: folk tunes, protest songs, rock anthems, and rap. Unwin as Sammy’s father Yitzhak sings a heartbreaking ballad against getting involved (“They’re only words. Just pebbles through our windows. Words. They’re only letters on our doors.”) There’s a hint of ragtime behind the dancing sandwich boards of a news-themed song and Flamenco-style strumming in the background of the rousing No Pasarán! (“they shall not pass”), based a slogan from the Spanish Civil War. Stellar guitarist Max Alexander-Taylor switches from electric and acoustic with energetic ease.
The cast, singing, dancing, playing instruments, sweeps through the varied numbers with beguiling, light-touch choreography by Jevan Howard Jones. The moves are both airy and sharp, fitting perfectly with Adam Lenson’s powerfully fluid and seamless direction. Lenson fills the space with purposeful movement as a rolling table becomes bakery counter, pub bar, kitchen table, barricade. And talented actors shapeshift around it. Ethan Pascal Peters morphs, in the blink of an eye, from vulnerable, observant Moishe Scheinberg to British-Caribbean communist to cheekily clownish embodiment of the despot-worshipping Daily Mail.
Set designer Yoav Segal’s grandfather took part in the original battle of Cable Street when he was nineteen years old. Segal’s brilliant set includes a fringe of mismatched planks, corrugated metal and lanterns, with two front doors facing each other. A hyper-realist brick tenement building in the background is enhanced by skilled lighting effects from Sam Waddington and Ben Jacobs: silhouette-forming sunsets, variously lit windows, and the shifting glow of urban life cleverly mark temporal and emotional changes. A camp, but sinister number by the armband-toting BUF is all the more menacing for being bathed in pink. Lu Herbert’s well-designed costumes make a sharp distinction between individuals (green-coated Oonagh or a stylish female revolutionary in red) and the uniformed fascists.
Three different working-class families share the busy stage. The third household, beside Sammy’s and Mairead’s, consists of pain-ridden, gin-swilling Edie (believable Preeya Kalidis) and her son, unemployed Ron (Barney Wilkinson). They have moved to London, “where it’s crowded and shit”, looking for work. Ron’s angry powerlessness leads him to the fascists, singing: “Let it burn, let it burn/ Move out the way; you’ve had your turn.”
Jews, Irish workers, dockers, trade unionists and others make common cause, in their hundreds of thousands, against the divisive forces of fascism. They plan to blockade Cable Street and stop Mosley’s troops from marching through it. One headscarf-wearing anti-fascist (Chazen again) says she’s “gonna need a bigger rolling pin.”
It’s a challenging task to compress complicated historical contexts involving disparate communities into a couple of hours’ singing and dancing, and there are some dodgy accents along the way. But the abiding messages are simple enough. We need to look beyond “different food, different ways, different customs and holy days” to discover what we have in common (“same fears, same old cares”). “Get rid of the hate in your heart and make some room,” runs the song Stranger Sister about the power of solidarity. It’s as crucial and relevant now as it was 90 years ago.
Runs until 28 February 2026
