Akenfield is a film made by Peter Hall in 1974, based loosely upon the book Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village by Ronald Blythe (1969). Blythe himself has a cameo role as the vicar and all other parts are played by real-life villagers who improvised their own dialogue. There are no professional actors in the piece. Blythe's book is the distillation of interviews with local people, and his technique is somewhat echoed in the pioneering verbatim theatre style developed in London Road at the National Theatre in 2011. Akenfield the film is a work of fiction, based on an 18-page story synopsis by Blythe.