THEATRE REVIEW: Luke Wright: Ballad-Seller - The Edge Theatre, Chorlton, Manchester.

Luke Wright is obviously a very intelligent and knowledgeable young man. Instead of just standing on stage in his one-man show and reciting his own performance poetry, he creates poems out of a period of history which fascinates him; taking actual articles of the time and updating them in order that our contemporary ears will understand the story adding touches of his own and some humour too along the way.

The period of history in question being the Georgian era. A time of great upheaval economically and politically, and preceded the rule of Queen Victoria. His show gave us a few historical gems and gave us the background necessary in order to understand his own poems. We were told about the newpapers of the day, the Broadsheets, and the origin of the word 'ballad': not a slow, romantic song that the word is now used to denote, but the rhyming verses of news printed onto these broadsheets. Wright had taken a few of his favourite 'ballads' from those broadsheets and rewritten them.

At one point in his routine he even tries to 'teach' us the metric form of a ballad (iambic tetrametre), but it is not at all 'heavy going', Wright makes it accessible and humorous, throwing in a few jokes before and even sometimes during his reciting. 

Wright tends to speak quite quickly, and at times, this does make his speech a little 'lazy' sounding, and a few of the lines of his verses were difficult to understand because of it. His passion for the verses and the performance of them is never in question, as he finds different voices and body language for each character mentioned. [even if his Norfolk accent was somewhat suspect...!]

The poems were all long narrative poems, but his storytelling was secure, and the final poem of the evening was truly epic in nature. 

Reviewer - Matthew Dougall

on - 14.10.21