When Shakespeare’s Globe opened for business, its artistic aims were enshrined
in that possessive noun. The policy of keeping things strictly Shakespearian
began to shift when Mark Rylance made way for Dominic Dromgoole, an artistic
director with a background in coaxing new plays onto the stage. Since 2006,
a number of new works have infiltrated the theatre’s summer programme
alongside Shakespeare. The break with the past has never been entire,
however, because all of them have been on a historical theme. Until now.
The Frontline is the first new play about contemporary England to be performed
at the Globe since The Merry Wives of Windsor. But this is not a snapshot of
mercantile society. The Frontline is set exactly where it says it is: on the
crackling, buzzing pavement in front of a busy London Underground station.
Its two hours of traffic will usher onto the Globe’s thrust stage a variety
of addicts, dealers, drunks, hobos and refugees such as are found only in a
teeming postimperial metropolis. The playwright who set much of Henry IV,
Part I in the Boar’s Head tavern would no doubt approve.
The playwright charged with bringing Shakespeare’s Globe into the 21st
century, meanwhile, has his revolutionary credentials emblazoned in his
name. Ché Walker may not, to casual theatregoers, seem a name to conjure
with. Two of his most high-profile plays have been performed at the Royal
Court – his debut, Been So Long, in 1998 and Flesh Wound in 2003. The
Frontline’s dramatis personae would normally be found cussing and screaming
about life’s injustices in that building, and in a perfect world may have
ended up there.
“I had actually had the idea several years before,” Walker says. “I was
waiting for a night bus, saw a lot of drug business going on and thought it
would make a wonderful play. Then I put it to the back of my mind because it
needed an enormous cast. I thought, with the exigencies of new writing, it
was pointless.” Then, at a wedding, Walker happened to meet Dromgoole, who
summoned him to the Globe to talk further. “He showed me the space, which
I’d never seen, and his exact words were that he wanted ‘a swirling, dirty,
smelly, contemporary play’.” To familiarise himself with the Globe’s unique
personality, Walker took the pragmatic step of crowbarring himself into the
cast of last summer’s production of Othello, which was directed by Wilson
Milam, the lanky American at whose wedding he had met Dromgoole, and who had
staged Flesh Wound.
“I absolutely bombarded him until he agreed to give me two small parts. I had
to audition and audition. He wanted to recall me for a third time.” Milam’s
reluctance may have been occasioned by Walker’s rustiness as an actor.
Although he trained at Webber Douglas and was acting before he started
writing, teaching and, more recently, directing, he hadn’t been on stage in
several years.
“I tend to get about two or three jobs a year,” he says. “I’d love to do more,
but I think I don’t audition well – I think I give off something in the
room. I’m still trying to figure out what it is. I’d been on television,
popping up as drug-dealers and bouncers.” You can see why: now 39, Walker is
a cheery man-mountain who spent his teenage years in basketball teams where
he was the only white boy.
He used his time in Othello productively. He would come on in the first act
and return in the fifth. “I wrote the play in the attic in my two-hour
break, while wearing doublet and hose.” What he learnt about the Globe is
that “you just have to come on and tell them where you are and what the
situation is, and the audience make this huge leap. They just go, ‘Okay,
I’ll go with that.’ Until you lie to them or do something badly, they’ll
just keep going with you. It’s quite unique in that respect. There is this
direct communication with the audience. You have to belt it out, you have to
drive the story home”.
Walker’s story, which incorporates a multitude of characters, takes its
reference points from American literature and film, particularly the loose,
baggy monster that is Robert Altman’s Nashville and the plays of Lanford
Wilson (Walker has directed these at Rada), in which overlapping dialogue
creates a messy babel of competing voices. “I’ve wanted to use this
technique for a while. Sometimes, someone will talk absolutely for ever,
which operates as a bass line; then there’s a harmony on top of it, which is
the conversation that you really want to follow.”
Like Walker’s previous plays, The Frontline is a product of his background.
His father is Robert Walker, who ran the Half Moon theatre in the East End;
his mother is the actress Ann Mitchell (Dolly from Widows). He grew up in a
council flat in the grimmest part of Camden Town. “Yet we had loads of books
and intellectual discourse,” he recalls. “I always felt I had one foot in
one world and one foot in another.”
During a lean patch as an actor, he took a job as a security guard and stayed
for eight years: “My father once said to me, ‘I’ve worked so hard to get
myself out of the working class, and you seem determined to work your way
back into it.’” It was in his security guard’s uniform that he wrote his
first play, based on observing waifs and strays in a Camden bar. “I wanted
to be expressing myself creatively and reached the point where I thought,
‘I’m going to explode’,” he recalls. “Thankfully, this job meant that I
could sit down and write. Nobody came to bother me.”
Walker has since taught acting in prison and at young offenders’ institutes,
as well as to the homeless at Centre-point. “I think I’m the only person to
have taught at Rada and Brixton prison on the same day,” he adds. That
experience has all been vacuumed up into his theatrical portraits of the
dispossessed and the damned, and of the improbable pursuit of redemption.
“I like to think all my plays are celebrations, even if things are very, very
dark and tough in them,” he says. “Some people fall and some survive, but
everyone fights to the last drop, which I think is worth celebrating.”
The Frontline premieres at Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1, on July 6
