The Frontline
Shakespeare’s Globe, London
CAMDEN Town on a Saturday night: the tube station vomits out a steady stream of drop-outs, misfits, addicts and other lowlifes, garnished with the sad, the bad and the lost. Yes, Che Walker’s The Frontline is a panorama of urban life, as Beth the born-again Christian swaps words with Erkenwald the hot-dog vendor, while Violet the lap-dancer makes eyes at Marcus the bouncer and a handful of dealers get ready to fight over their pitch.
In this sprawling chaos, what you remember are the comic moments. One running joke is the frantic phone calls made by Mordechai Thurrock, a self-obsessed playwright. Another concerns an old gent called Ragdale, who is deluded into thinking that he is related to every young women who comes across his path. Yet another is Babydoll, Violet’s daughter, who is the quintessential gobby teen.
But what are the politics of this chaotic slice-of-low-life? Walker uses songs — belted out by the huge cast of 23 — to make his point. The first argues that these needy losers are “invisible” and deserve a voice. It’s moving stuff, until you realise that it’s simply untrue. Not only are the poor more visible than ever, but their voices are heard in the streets and on the media. And often on stage. And at high volume too. Another song claims that “the war on drugs is just a war on blacks”. Right on – but is it actually true?
More seriously, this sprawling and confused portrait of the lost, the vicious and the funny quickly becomes a parade of some of the stalest urban clichés in the book. Here comes the chav teen — yawn. There stumbles his valium-plastered mum — yawn. Here struts the black drug dealer — snore. There strides the East End gangster — ho hum. Such clichés induce a terminal boredom that no amount of singing, dancing and jokes can dispel.
This is sad because, in the mid-1990s, Walker was one of the handful of new writers who blew away the cobwebs suffocating British theatre with a blast of poetic street-slang and real urban nightlife. Now, however, the depiction of chavs and low-lifes has become as clichéd as cigarette-holder-wielding stage aristocrats once were in the 1950s. So although Walker’s text is still shot through with thrilling moments of dirty poetry, these gems are buried under a dump of ordure.
Finally, this messy epic is simply too ambitious for this theatre. Walker uses the sophisticated technique of having two, or sometimes three, conversations happening simultaneously, with overlapping dialogues. In the open air of Shakespeare’s Globe, the chief result is to make many of the speeches inaudible. To make matters worse, director Matthew Dunster struggles visibly to control his huge cast and most of the stage pictures are an ugly mess.
Sadly, this long evening quickly becomes an endurance test. Although some of the young people in the audience can enjoy a bit of dance during the musical numbers, most spectators will bemoan the absence of a strong narrator to guide us through this world, or a strong plot to keep our attention. Of course, it’s great that Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, has commissioned big new plays for this olde worlde theatre — but it’s equally irresponsible of him to stage this particular waste of time.
Aleks Sierz
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