Viva Lewes Issue #135 December 2017

ON THIS MONTH: TALK
Luke Wright
Leftist poet, playwright…
and actor
Before taking on board a simple suggestion by
his stage director in 2015, Luke Wright was a live
poet. Afterwards, he became a playwright and an
actor, too. It was quite a step in his career.
The piece in question was called What I Learnt
from Johnny Bevan, and it was an hour-long show
looking at the rise of neo-liberalism and the effect
it has on two left wingers who meet at university
in the eighties, and then again twenty years later.
“I initially wrote it in the third person,” Luke tells
me (in a café in Hove), “and I was going to tell it
as I tell my poems, and my director said ‘use a first
person narrative! You just need to say ‘I’ and not
‘he’’. That was a big shift because it meant that
suddenly I was going to be acting [and not just
reciting] … but actually it made the whole thing a
lot more urgent. And emotionally relevant. And so
it became a play rather than a long poem.”
He took it to the Edinburgh Fringe, and on tour
around the country: among the many awards he
won was the ‘Stage Award for Acting Excellence.’
“So I thought ‘at least I’m not terrible’,” he says.
With his next big stage project, Frankie Vah, Luke
“had no doubt how to do it”. The play was a big
success at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and he’s
performing it in Lewes – organised by the Lewes
Labour Party as their Christmas celebration, but
open to the public – as a warm up before touring it
round the country in January.
Frankie Vah is the story, set in 1987, of a young
man who becomes a ranting political poet, “in
the mode of John Cooper Clarke… or Attila the
Stockbroker”, and gets involved in the equivalent
of the Red Wedge tour, the fund-raising tour for
the Labour Party which involved the likes of Paul
Weller and Billy Bragg. “It all starts to unravel for
him,” says Luke. “It’s about desperately wanting to
believe in something, and how fervent all-encompassing
blinkered belief can be really damaging to
the people around you.”
Luke was five at the time, but he’s done plenty of
research (“I’ve got friends who were involved”)
and he believes the tour backfired somewhat:
“The idea was that the coolness of the rock stars
would rub off on the Labour Party. Actually what
happened was the naffness of the Labour Party
rubbed off on the rock stars… Paul Weller was
never cool again.”
Before meeting Luke I’ve done a bit of research
on his website (I strongly recommend checking
out his ‘univowel’ poem Burt Up Pub) and noticed
that one of the venues on his tour in January is
the Merthyr Tydfil Conservative Club. For such a
lefty, this seems strange, I point out. He chuckles,
nervously. “It’s not my natural home,” he says, “but
it’s just a venue. Anyway, I don’t think Tories are
evil. I just think they’re wrong.” Alex Leith
Lewes Labour's Seasonal Night Out, St Mary's
Social Centre, 23rd December, £8/6, 7.30pm
Photo by Idil Sukan
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