The Frontline ****

Shakespeare’s Globe, where history really does come alive, has been thrust into the present for the first time with it’s commissioned musical ‘The Frontline’ by Che Walker.
Outside Camden tube station, Saturday night. Who hasn’t been there? Who doesn’t have shamefully familiar hazy stories framed by blinking lights and the lingering odours of alcohol and hot dogs. The audience is thrown into it with the death of smooth jazz and birth of rap, and evangelists singing and brandishing crosses as if us sinners have developed werewolf/vampire alter egos. Oddly enough, it sparkles with gems of comic genius within it’s blink and you’ll miss it, helter-skelter dialogue. The Frontline is a web intertwining stories, too many for them all to develop to a satisfactory climax, but all to be praised for their emotion, message and relevance within modern society. Che Walker perhaps has been a bit too ambitious, but it would spoil the show to lose any of it’s fabulous characters, so well written, the audience don’t fail to connect with each and every one of them.
Played by a faultless cast, the characters include prostitutes, two rival drug dealers (whose fight somehow manage to lovingly echo the matrix), Beth (Golda Roshevel) who replaced her drug addiction with one for Jesus, egomaniac Mordechai Thurrock (Trystan Gravelle) compulsively attempting to ‘entice’ an agent to see his play, cocky but impressionable teenager Elliot (Ashley Rolfe), and the link to the past, Ragdale (Paul Copley). And that’s just a few, this play has everything. It’s only fair to say that the whole ensemble give a stellar performance, but the beauty of complex, adorable Mordechai Thurrock, passionately played by rising star Trystan Gravelle is the ace in the pack.
The juggernaut pace the spinning dialogue creates propels you through the two and a half hours, and with the overlapping styles of music and dance, the turbulent atmosphere of the curb-crawlers of Camden comes alive. The need. The rush. The tragedy. The realisation that love can exist in the lowest of places, a place dealt that they seem hopelessly resigned to. Walker’s play, Fox’s music, Lamb’s intelligent choreography and Dunster’s glue has brought the Globe into the 21st century. Like the characters, The Frontline has it’s faults, but shamelessly exposes the beauty and cruelty of London which manages to pluck at the audience’s heartstrings like a grim musician.

Veronica Grubb