Luke Wright
The Toll
Tickets £13/£11 Concessions(inc. a £1 booking fee per ticket)
Running time: TBC
Some days I pass for twenty-fiveI’m ASOS, piss-ups, plans and rage,a scattergun of quips and punswhen every drink’s a stageBut other days I feel my age,when all my cards have been declinedwhen sins, like tin cans on a string,come rattling behind.
The dust never settles. Oblivion lurks in every tastefully decorated living room. Somewhere, someone forgets to put out the bin.
There’s a darkness at the heart of Luke Wright’s new show. Nestled among the linguistic pugilism and bawdy rhyming couplets there’s something more vulnerable. Here the poet and his characters struggle with doubt, duty and a score of evenings spent shouting impotently at Question Time.
The poems in The Toll tour the flat-roofed pubs and half-bought couches of Brexit Britain, and even go back in time to London’s gas-lit 19th century streets. Meet Edward Dando the oyster-guzzling hero of the late-Georgian broadsides; witness Iain Duncan Smith being taken to pieces in a poem that utilises only one type of vowel; and raise a warm can of Stella with the Essex campers who spot a lion prowling the marshes.
The characters that populate these poems are diverse and strange but they, like Wright, are all facing moral conundrums. There’s decisions to make; questions to answer; gin to drink.
Wright makes poetry accessible, normal even. Spend an evening with a raconteur at the top of his game, as he spits out visceral, inventive verse that sweats, bleeds and sings.
“Visceral, poignant, and riotously funny”The Scotsman
“A rip-roaring raconteur, evoking a Larkin-esque sense of commuter belt ennui”Metro
“Cool poems”Patti Smith
Twitter: @lukewrightpoet
Tickets are available:Online via the Barbican Theatre website (24 hours a day, 7 days a week)In person at the Barbican Theatre & B-Bar (Mon-Fri 11am-6pm)Or by telephone through the Box Office on 01752 267131 (Mon-Fri 11am-6pm)
Please note that there is a £1 booking fee per ticket, and all bookings paid for by card (on website, in person or via the box office phone line) are subject to a £2 processing fee per order.