What happens if you love your parents but loathe their politics? In Frankie Vah, the second verse play written and performed by Luke Wright, Frankie struggles to reconcile his father’s “Christian empathy” as a vicar with the fact that he puts a cross next to Margaret Thatcher’s name at the ballot box. Frankie abandons the vicarage for a life on the road as a radical left punk poet. The dog collar is traded in for a pair of DMs.
Before the show begins, a spool of TV footage from the 1980s unfurls on the wall: flitting images of Spitting Image, Neil Kinnock falling into the sea and a post-Falklands Thatcher triumphant atop a tank.
Frankie Vah is born Simon Mortimer in the life-sapping Dedham Vale (the part of Essex that John Constable used to paint). With his teenage years spent watching water mills, altar screens and ponds, our hero longs for university. There, he discovers himself both politically and poetically after chancing upon a gig by the Ranting Poets, “forged from punk and now at war in Thatcher’s Britain”. Deciding to become a performance poet, Mortimer metamorphoses into Frankie Vah; less pen name, more nom-de-guerre.
He finds love with fellow ally and artist Eve, flings his father’s faith back in his face, escapes to a “scabby flat” in London and joins a Red Wedge-inspired indie band on tour as a support act during the 1987 general election. Wright is a clever playwright and a charismatic performer; he conjures minor characters to life with wit and verve in particular the boastful lisping Liverpudlian tour manager Petey.
Delivered entirely in verse, Frankie flies between filling us in on where he’s at in life to performing his poems to the “paying” public; we are cast as both his confidants and his audience. This creates an interesting tension particularly towards the end when his growing fame and self-destructive behaviour begin to unravel the persona he’s created for us.
Throughout the piece, Frankie highlights how the left have to fight on two fronts – against not only Thatcher’s Tories but also against the centre of their own party. Debates rage on stage about the best way for Labour to gain the keys to Number 10 – how much principle should be lost for how much power gained? Times may have changed, but it seems the fundamental questions are eternal.
Some argue that there’s no place for the political in plays – and I know of several playwrights who would reject that label – but drama and politics have much in common. They’re both fundamentally about a disruption to the status quo. Whereas most coming-of-age stories on the stage tend to focus solely on the personal, Frankie Vah is all the richer for its political and poetical layers. If the purpose of poetry is to make us bilingual in our own language, Wright succeeds in finding new and beautiful ways of expressing the everyday.
- Atiha Sen Gupta is a playwright and has written one of the Power Plays to be released by Theatre Uncut
- Frankie Vah is at Soho theatre, London, until 5 May. Then touring.
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