Review: BALLAD LINES, Southwark Playhouse

Photo credit: Pamela Raith

Ballad Lines is a new folk musical that loosely focuses on human lineage and the stories of our ancestors. The show blends Irish, Scottish, and Appalachian ballads with contemporary melodies to paint the family history of Sarah, a queer woman in today’s New York. Traversing centuries and multiple musical genres, the show is very ambitious.

The production unfortunately lacks a clear focus. Many of the musical numbers, though often excellent in isolation, are allowed to linger far beyond their dramatic usefulness. This is not a critique of their quality so much as of their context. The narrative they aim to serve is perilously scant, and the characters sometimes so thinly sketched that the accumulation of material only serves to expose, rather than conceal, the lack of substance beneath.

The audience is asked to expend considerable intellectual effort attempting to stitch together a narrative that persistently resists cohesion. To little surprise, emotional engagement proves elusive. We learn virtually nothing of who each character is beyond their immediate narrative function; they exist less as people than as mechanisms, shunted from one plot point to the next. The final scenes are laden with a sudden glut of exposition that the second act has been missing and yet elicits little emotion due to its hastiness.

TK Hay’s set design makes admirable use of the available space, though it feels that a show with such ambition now needs a space able to contain the magnitude of this show’s score, and some of the cast’s seismic performances. Sydney Sainté gives a brilliant performance as Alix, Sarah’s high-flying partner, and Kirsty Findlay’s portrayal of Cait is raw and electric. Siân Louise Dowdalls also buoys many moments with her earnestness contributing to the piece’s comedy. At times, other performances lose clarity due to overly loud underscoring and/or clarity of diction, which proves a little frustrating.

There is undeniably rich material here, but Finn Anderson and Tania Azevedo (co-bookwriters) need to do as their protagonist does and look at the piece’s component parts and decide what story they want to tell to future audiences.

** Two stars

Reviewed by: Jeff Mostyn

Ballad Lines plays at London’s Southwark Playhouse Elephant until 21 March, with further info here.