Peepshow: Emptiness and resignation - it's Lamb, the musical

Ever stared at a block of flats and wondered what dramas are played out within? Brian Logan finds out

These pop compilation musicals are all the rage, aren't they? Abba, Queen, Madness ... Lamb? "I was talking to a friend of mine the other day," says Lou Rhodes of the acclaimed electronica band Lamb, "and he said, 'So is this show Lamb's Mamma Mia!?' I was like, 'Oh no, what a horrible thought!'" This show is Peepshow, on which Lamb have collaborated with Frantic Assembly (heartfelt, hyperactive dance-theatre pioneers). In the West End, this is a formula that brings maximum profit for minimum risk. Elsewhere, it can mean artists exploring how their work reacts when brought together, and what musical theatre might mean beyond flying cars and rictus-grinned chorus lines.

It was Frantic Assembly's artistic directors, Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett, who first approached Lamb, albeit hesitantly. The pair were developing an idea for a theatre piece offering voyeuristic flashes of lives in a tower block. Their ideal soundtrack, they realised, comprised almost exclusively Lamb songs. But – "We'd loved Lamb for years and years," says Graham, "and we were a little bit too starstruck to contact them." When finally they did, "it didn't seem an unusual request," says Lou Rhodes. Theatre companies were often after their music; the film director Baz Luhrmann also used one of their tunes, "Gorecki", in Moulin Rouge. "Passionate music and torch songs like ours," says Rhodes, "have always attracted people from the theatre. Whereas your average punter thinks we're a bit arty, really."

Frantic Assembly's inquiry stood out, however. Here was a company with an illustrious reputation, who wanted, not simply to appropriate the band's oeuvre, but to involve them in creative collaboration. They didn't want new Lamb material. "It'd be wrong for us to ask, 'Can you do us a couple of tunes by Friday?'" says Scott Graham And anyway, says Hoggett, "We were happy with their songs as they were. For us the theatricality was already there." But Lamb (Rhodes and her sidekick Andy Barlow) were welcomed into Peepshow's creative team: to tweak tunes to suit the show's dramatic shape, to excavate long-lost mixes when required, to offer advice, suggestions and support.

You can't really run away from the fact, says Rhodes, that the resultant production (Frantic's biggest ever) is a musical. The Lamb songs aren't mere aural wallpaper: they're sung by Frantic's seven-strong cast. At first, Hoggett and Graham despaired of recreating the band's ethereal sound. "Lou's voice is an incredible instrument," says Graham, "but it also has a massive amount of technology behind it. There are times when she whispers into a £1,000 microphone, and that's beamed out of a 1000-watt speakers. And you think: that's what we've got to achieve!" Gloom threatened to set in when Hoggett and Graham were warned "that the sound we wanted wasn't technically possible, that we wouldn't be able to sing intimately even with the microphones close. If the actors had had to belt the songs out, it would have been a nightmare." Belting songs out was one musical convention from which Frantic sought to escape. "These songs don't work like songs in a normal musical," says Hoggett. "They don't necessarily move the action forward. They're points at which we allow the audience to get deeper and deeper under the show's skin."

So how do Lamb themselves feel about Peepshow? "I was quite nervous," Rhodes admits, "because those songs are very personal to me." But she was determined to be philosophical. "We had to let them make our songs their own. And, in a sense, the very act of putting them in that play changes the songs anyway. Peepshow seems to communicate a degree of emptiness or resignation with regard to human relationships, which is not something I feel my songs necessarily convey." Does that make her uncomfortable? "When it comes to art," she replies, "it's not a case of agreeing with everything, it's about somebody else's right to self-expression. It's just good to have that type of collaboration," she adds. "It brings a richness to what we do."

The project's been well worthwhile – and not only because Lamb and Frantic Assembly have now significantly extended one another's audience. Working on Peepshow has also changed the way Rhodes and Barlow regard their own music. "It's just thrown a lot of stuff up for me," says Rhodes, "about our audiences and about how we're perceived and about ways of developing our live shows." It's also changed the way she thinks about herself. "The first time I saw the run-through of Peepshow and heard these people singing my songs, I was like, "Shit, I'm a songwriter. A proper one." When you yourself do something, you don't really take yourself seriously. When somebody else re-interprets what you write, it's really fulfilling."

From Frantic's perspective, the show has eroded their prejudices about musical theatre. "I wouldn't say I like musicals," says Scott Graham, "but I do think they have the most potential of any theatrical form." According to Steven Hoggett, "There's no point people sitting on the sidelines moaning about the musical as an art form. It's about companies getting off their arses and doing something with it." That's what they've done with Peepshow, and it seems to have paid off. "Some people who have an idea of how music and singing works onstage think the show's groundbreaking," says Graham. "Or they think it's lacking. One way or another, it doesn't conform to what they think a musical should do."

'Peepshow': Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 (020 8741 2311) Weds to 23 November