North East Theatre Guide: Preview: The Toll Press at Sunderland Peacock

The Toll Press

Sunderland Peacock

Thursday 12^th October 2017

Internationally renowned performance poet Luke Wright comes to The Peacock in Sunderland supported Rowan McCabe, the world’s first door to door poet, on 12^th October at 7.30pm.

Luke Wright

There’s a fun darkness at the heart of Luke Wright’s new show. Nestled among the linguistic 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 Essexcampers 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 on 12^th October in Sunderland, as he spits out visceral, inventive verse that sweats, bleeds and sings.

Luke Wright is an award winning poet and theatre-maker. The Toll is his tenth solo stage show. Since 1999 he’s performed thousands of gigs with everyone from Beck to Patti Smith. His shows have toured the world and for the last four years he’s performed to hundreds of thousands of people in Britain as John Cooper Clarke’s warm-up act.

His play What I Learned From Johnny Bevan won a Fringe First and The Stage Award for Acting Excellence in 2015, a Saboteur Award in 2016, and is currently nominated for an Off-West End Award. Luke is a regular on BBCRadio and at Latitude, where he’s co-curated the UK’s biggest spoken word gig since 2006.