Luke Wright is best known on the performance poetry circuit, but his first solo theatre show is a pulsating, neatly handled piece of poetic storytelling. It’s one that feels particularly topical in light of the current Labour leadership contest, as the party struggles to decide whether it should return to its socialist roots or sacrifice idealism for electability.
What I Learned begins in the present with disillusioned music journalist, Nick, on a press junket for the launch of an edgy bespoke music and cultural festival, Urbania. Festival-goers will pay up to £1,400 to sleep in a refurbished east London tower block. Nick realises he’s been here before, in what now seems like another life, when he was young and the world hummed with promise. It was once home to his university mate Johnny Bevan, a working-class poet and hero whom middle-class Nick idolised.
The show neatly segues back to that first meeting at the Lit Soc’s poetry night, where Nick first gets a glimpse of Johnny, who opens Nick’s eyes to a different world, encouraging him to break away from the influence of his father and introducing him to poetry and Labour politics. In the summer following New Labour’s success at the polls after 18 years of Tory government, Johnny takes Nick back to his east London home and things start to go wrong.
Johnny has a touching faith that Tony Blair was only occupying the centre ground to get elected, and now, in power, will shift to the left. But as disillusionment sets in and Johnny feels increasingly betrayed and bitter, Blair is not the only idol who starts to teeter. Directed with the same distilled simplicity that he brought to Jack Thorne’s Bunny, director Joe Murphy ensures the breakneck storytelling is clear and gives Wright’s seething, dynamic poetry the room it needs to motor.
- At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 30 August. Box office: 0131-560 1581.
