PJ Harvey’s Thames musical is a damp squib

When the acid attacker Abdul Ezedi’s body was recovered from the Thames earlier this year, a number of newspapers reported a chilling statistic: an average of 31 individuals die each year in the river with 90% as a consequence of suicide.

Ben Power’s London Tide makes the point it was ever thus. The play focuses on Jake Wood’s boatman, who has a lucrative sideline fishing these unhappy souls out of the river and taking their money and valuables, not in modern-day London but in Victorian times.

It’s a strange piece – loosely based on Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, with songs by Power and PJ Harvey – that has about it themes of class and poverty but it doesn’t flow as effortlessly as the river itself.

Bella Maclean plays an impoverished young woman whose chance to improve her lot in life by marrying a rich man is stymied when he appears to have drowned and she begins a relationship with a mysterious tenant in her home played by Tom Mothersdale.

I am not really sure what this show is trying to say and it at best meanders along under Ian Rickson’s direction. The songs are instantly forgettable and serve only to delay the proceedings.

Bunny Christie’s set design, with Jack Knowles’s lighting, goes some way towards conjuring up a feeling of the capital during this period, but the cast seem to be generally drowning and not waving in roles that haven’t been properly thought through. Only Scott Karim – playing a splendidly vampiric villain – seems to be enjoying himself.

At National Theatre, London, until June 22