The Frontline
8 July 2008
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The Frontline is a big and a bold bit of theatre. There’s ribald, racy language, a pair of star-crossed lovers, music, mayhem and a lot of courageous playing to the crowd. Outside the tube on a Saturday night, the local lowlife gathers. Pedlars of hotdogs, lap dances, skunk and salvation tussle over the same patch of street, along with “lonely wee hooligan scumbag bastards” in hoodies.
Ché Walker’s writing aspires to present a polyphony of street-tongues and tales, often with different bits of dialogue happening in hairs-breadth counterpoint to one another. The resultant cacophony is invigorating in short bursts, but exasperating when it goes on, and during longer spells some of the audience resorted to talking among themselves. Matthew Dunster’s production, exuberantly choreographed by Georgina Lamb, exults in flooding the stage with waves of frenetic activity, but as the show progresses it’s the singular voices and presences of individuals that the audience comes to cherish.
Jo Martin exudes strident, lippy self-confidence as Violet, relentlessly circling Mo Sesay’s dogged, self-improving bouncer. Golda Rosheuvel plays convert Beth with longing in her eyes, and sings as if her life depended on it. And Danny Lee Wynter’s vociferous Benny is savvy and stroppy and fabulous. John Stahl and Kevorik Malikyan are the world-weary wise men who tie the threads of the show together, fatalistically regarding the follies and tragedies of youth, loaning a frayed-around-the-edges moral authority to the play’s unravelling drama.
Most of the audience enjoy themselves massively; laughing uproariously, whooping and whistling approval at the clap-traps, and energetically hissing the bad guy. They even seemed to like the slight and repetitive musical numbers that punctuate the action. However, the production’s indomitable, crowd-pleasing chirpiness sits uneasily with the show’s ambition to give a credible voice to London’s invisible inhabitants.
Walker’s script spends a lot of time satirising theatre’s fetishisation of a romanticised, ye olde London underworld, but The Frontline’s own tension between upbeat vibes and gritty realism never really gets resolved. So Robert Gwilym’s sadistic Cockburn, intended (I presume) as a figure of genuine menace, gets pelted by the audience with the kind of jocular derision usually reserved for King Rat. Old-fashioned reverence for the delights of the demimonde is simply replaced by a flashy, facile ghetto glamour that tends to skim over the very real dangers of streetstyle posturing.
Still, The Frontline makes a gutsy stab at being a contemporary social drama to match the vigour, daring and wit of Shakespearean precedent. Basically, it’s a feel-good fable about Londoners from all corners of the globe pulling together in the face of disaster, violence and intimidation. And a lot of Londoners were obviously responding to that message, and having a great time in the process, despite pelting rain. And you can’t really argue with that, can you?
The Frontline is at Shakespeare’s Globe until 17 August www.shakespearesglobe.org
Photo Top: Beru Tessema (Miruts), Kurt Egyiawan (Salim) in The Frontline at Shakespeare’s Globe (2008). Photograph by Manuel Harlan.
Photo Bottom: Danny Lee Wynter (Benny) and Matthew Newtion (Jimmy) in The Frontline at Shakespeare’s Globe (2008). Photograph by Manuel Harlan.
What a fantastic review! I saw this production too, but I didn’t notice the audience chatting while the actors were on stage. The mood was pretty euphoric overall. There seemed to be a couple of school classes in the audience who responded with candid laughter and the odd heckle, but that’s becoming common currency on the London stage as theatres target schools with their programming.
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