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Latitude
2010
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News
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Latitude Festival 2010 Reviews (15)LovesongWritten and directed by Che Walker Soul singer Omar stars in this one-man play with music: the staging is nothing but him standing at a keyboard at the front of the theatre tent's wide thrust stage. Che Walker's piece is perhaps more suited to an intimate bar or basement club environment; the theatre tent feels a little too big for it. But it's a fine piece of writing, wonderfully performed - and of course Omar is a complete natural in the part. And it integrates the songs into the narrative more seamlessly than Walker could achieve in Been So Long, his musical of last year which was adapted from an original straight play - the songs inevitably felt like they'd been inserted. Here, the tale is of a British soul singer and pop star who still performs but now feels jaded, faded, over the hill, and has lost his creative spark. He tours around grimy clubs making "personal appearances", taking cheques from the sleazy management and staying in cheap hotels. He orders in prostitutes and drinks too much, trying to fill the void made by the absence of inspiration and by his splitting up with the love of his life, Michaela. He takes us back to when they first met, and conjures up well the first whirl of their romance, even down to enchanted flower gardens - Walker is great at creating a high-flung riff of words to capture a moment and a feeling, he's a very musical writer in that sense. But the relationship didn't last, he couldn't stay faithful or keep sober. We meet him at his lowest point. The turn in the story comes when he finds redemption in an unusual place - in taking in and saving, physically and emotionally, the tearaway child next door who's been vandalising his property and terrorising him for the last two years. It would be a sentimental story if Walker didn't root it so well in blokey reality - the fact, for instance, that the ladies love a man who's taken in a problem child, so he gets more action now than ever. He's also really good at the mundane specifics of his main character's life - making us feel every grimy detail of his life on the road - and his inspired filthy language keeps things sharp: "She looked like they'd carved a statue of a woman out of blue stilton" is his description of one of the women he sleeps with. His relationship with the mouthy teenager he rescues is what saves the play from being merely a backwards-looking wallow in the misery of lost love. There's a real heart to this story, right down to the fact that he remembers what the teen was like as a smaller child when he first moved next door - "offered his sweets to me… such a kind little boy". I would have liked more exploration of him as a musician - there is a small description of how good it feels to disappear "inside the music", but not much more about his musician's mindset and how it influences how he sees the world. It's much more about him as a man. Walker is helped by a fine performance by Omar - drawing sympathy for a hard-to-like character, and fleshing out a fairly straightforward tale. Corinne Salisbury
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