Luke Wright - Frankie Vah
Luke Wright has been at the forefront of performance poetry for close to twenty years, cut from the same cloth as the likes of Dr John Cooper Clark, a performer he has frequently supported and so clearly admires. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Wright has turned his considerable talents towards the mid-eighties, when the likes of Clark and Attila the Stockbroker and Seething Wells made an alliance between poetry and politics the norm, rather than the exception.
Wright’s own work is frequently suffused with political commentary, ranging from splenetic rage against the likes of Ian Duncan Smith or Brexit, to a more melancholy examination of the broken lives and dreams of Estuary England. He’s not adverse to a bit of straightforward whimsy either – as evidenced by the gloriously daft Essex Lion – but his real gift is an uncanny ability to switch from comedy to tragedy, often in the same poem. Back in 2015, Wright used that gift to create “What I Learned from Johnny Bevan” an extraordinary one man show that brilliantly blurred the line between poem and play, winning him both praise and awards.
“Frankie Vah” sees Wright revisiting that audacious storytelling technique. It’s not a sequel to the previous show (though a precocious ten year old he meets was, I’m fairly sure, Johnnie in a cameo appearance) but it could be fairly described as a companion piece. Whereas Johnnie Bevan dealt with a disappointment in New Labour’s equivocal attitude to progressive politics, Frankie Vah goes back a generation earlier, when organisations like Red Wedge toured the country with unambiguous anti-Thatcher messages. This new work tells the story of Simon Mortimer, the son of an Essex vicar who performs under the stage name of Frankie Vah, as the support act for a politically active band.
Wright tells the uneasy journey of an ideologist, fuelled by drink and drugs and righteous anger, yet human enough to be distracted by the glamour of fame and vain enough to let romance and family slip through his fingers. The play is remarkably evocative of the period, particularly when you consider that Luke Wright would have been around three when all this was going on. For those of us ancient enough to have been there at the time, the grim earnestness and interminable factional rows are spot on. Apart from minor slips noticed only by pedants – video installation wasn’t yet a thing, and if creative writing had been a thing I would have done it – Wright demonstrates an uncanny ability to weave his research into an authentic tapestry of the times, presenting an effective rebuttal to the received wisdom that the eighties were a decade of loadsamoney excess.
With subtle use of back projection, evocative lighting and music (not least a cracking selection of mid-eighties tunes used to warm up the audience beforehand) this was a proper theatrical experience that zipped along with energy and pace. It says much for Wright’s storytelling stagecraft – skills reminiscent of Mark Thomas or Spalding Gray – that the sheer technical wizardry involved in constructing an hour long verse was something that only registered after the performance. As the rhythms of performance poetry pushed forward the narrative with a momentum that was utterly absorbing I was too busy wondering what was going to happen next to notice how clever all this was. On later reflection, however, it’s clear how, by subtly shifting the meter of the verse, along with the tone and pace with which it was delivered, Wright was able to mirror the inner turmoil and emotional intensity of his protagonist.
Particularly effective was the ease with which he flipped between the intimate confessional of Simon Mortimer and the cocksure delivery of his alter ego’s stand-up routines. Tellingly, Wright regularly drew an instinctive knee-jerk applause from his audience when performing as Vah (dong a very passable imitation, incidentally, of Mark Miwurdz). It was as if, just for that moment, Vah was a not character in a play, but really was a poet in support of a band, and that, for one night only, the Arts Centre had turned back into Premises.
With a stand-up poet as his protagonist, Wright was bound to raise questions of autobiography and personal fealty, but I don’t think we should not dwell over this. Perhaps Wright does feel betrayed by Blair in the way Vah feels betrayed by Kinnock, and despises May in the same way Vah despises Thatcher, but I think he has something altogether more nuanced in his sights. Far smarter than barefaced agitprop, Wright seems more interested in exploring the conflict between loyalty and compromise, and the schism between principles and power, and is wise enough to steer away from easy answers. Nothing, he suggests, is more fragile than certainty, and nothing wiser than hindsight.
