Writer: Alexander Williams
Composer: Phil Craddock
Alexander Williams has created an infidelity musical based in the most unlikely location, “grisly, grim, grey old Slough.” This 60-minute show playing at the Hope Theatre as part of the Camden Fringe 2025 has lots of promising ideas but suffers from the same identity crisis as the protagonist, who suddenly finds his new life is not what he thought it was. Love in Slough is a monologue, yet the number of Phil Craddock’s original jazzy songs also suggests it wants to be a sung-through musical, so more thought is needed on how the songs and music can tell the same story.
Meeting the woman of his dreams at a carnival in Brazil, they fly home to start the perfect life in England, a long marriage funded by two different but successful jobs and three children that the speaker primarily cares for. But after 20-plus years, a sudden change in circumstances reveals the gaps in his comfortable existence.
There are promising aspects to Love in Slough. Williams has created a likeable main character and a strong sense of a broader life across decades that includes a whirl of parenting, work and life experience. And, equally, there is a solid sense of the challenges of that, the sacrifices the central couple must make, particularly in their intimate life as the demands of maintaining everything else that comes between them.
Likewise, Craddock’s songs have an old school jazz musical style with a romantic overtone as the storyteller reflects on anything from his love of sketching birds with his children to the woes of losing his job and the opportunities to reconfigure his marriage. There’s even an entertaining Noël Coward pastiche, while some of the music also adopts the voice of secondary characters all impersonated by the lead, which adds variety to not always essential plot detail.
The problem is that trying to merge them together doesn’t always provide as much clarity as it should. Sometimes, it seems the songs have been written separately and a story fitted around them, repeating things told in the few lines of dialogue or saying something tangential. And there are far too many songs for the amount of story being presented, almost relentless in their volume as Love in Slough strives to be a sung-through show.
Williams’ performance is warm and friendly, enthused by the many things that happen to him and brings the audience along. It needs more character development, particularly for the people we only hear about – his wife, the women he meets in the bank and friend Henry – as well as a chance to reflect on the practicalities of betrayal, redundancy and family life. The compromise at the end is too rapidly and easily agreed, while equivalent emotions pass too quickly once the revelations begin. But Slough-lovers will delight in the town’s role in reinvigorating this man’s lonely life.
Reviewed on 30 July 2025
Camden Fringe runs until 24 August 2025
