Ché Walker’s Burnt-Up Love at the Finborough Theatre: Crime and Redemption In A Shining Gem Of A Show

Fringe venues perform a vital role on the ecology of London theatre. While many shows at these small venues are underfunded, and some are frankly rough as well as ready, you can occasionally stumble across a gem. A shining. A shiny gem. This is exactly what I think of Ché Walker’s latest play, Burnt-Up Love, which is currently at the tiny Finborough Theatre, an award-winning venue — run for the past 25 years by Neil McPherson — which specializes both in rediscovering forgotten masterpieces and staging vital new work. Walker’s work, which in the past included the dazzling Been So Long and The Frontline, is always written with a fine mixture of emotional realism, verbal poetry and dark humour — and his latest is no exception.

But the story is grim. Mac is a violent prisoner who has killed his wife, and is now nearing the end of his sentence. One of the things that keeps him going is an old photo of his little girl, aged about three and a bit, which he keeps on his cell wall. When he finally gets out after being incarcerated for 20 years, he begins a search to find her. She meanwhile has problems of her own. Having grown up in care, and called Scratch, she is surviving as a thief, “a feral wolf child”, living with a guy called Ramon. Then she meets JayJayJay, another free spirit, and they fall in love. But, as the title alerts us, Mac’s violence passes down the generations — and both young women are soon in danger.

This is one of those short plays, told in three narrative voices, that roars into your head and then echoes around your cranium, mugging the brain cells and scraping the bone. Its emotional charge of aggression and sexuality reminds us of the wildness of the human spirit. Usually concealed and suppressed by our polite normality, this feeling of uncontrolled craziness lurks not only on the periphery of society (who’s that shouting in the street at night?), but also in each of our souls (who could I become if I followed my Id?). This jagged passion is both enviable and abhorrent. You desire it, but avoid it. Want it, but fear it. Love it, but run from it. Yes, that’s the emotional fuel of Burnt-Up Love.

And burns it does. Walker’s text mixes streetsmart realism, fierce and funny feelings, with poetic moments and baroque formulations. At one point, the language is demotic, at another, it sounds almost Edwardian. The sensibility is pained trauma punctuated by surreal flashes and comic book vividness. Demotic phrases such as “wot?” and “summat” are followed, then pushed aside, by sharp images, maybe of ants drowning in milk and blood. Animal imagery stalks the streets; there’s a smell of cooking flesh. Asked by JayJayJay who her parents were, Scratch says, “I’m an amoeba.” Alone in the world she is drifting downstream, on her way to a becoming. Becoming what? We don’t know.

But as well as these verbal pictures, which remind me of the best of Philip Ridley, Walker also includes a lot of emotional intelligence, showing the vulnerability behind the young women’s bravado, the slide from energy into lethargy, from crazed violence to debilitating depression. His analysis of prison life, with a sharp criticism of the myth of the Alpha male, is likewise right on the nose. And his view of Mac’s sentimental attachment to a child he hasn’t seen for decades, and doesn’t know, which is his way of surviving incarceration, is surely credible. This is a play about how the disadvantaged, the distressed, the desperate live in our society. It is not a documentary, but its picture of the emotional and psychological make-up of outsiders is powerfully true.

This production features a programme note by Crispin Horner about reintegrating prisoners into society in the UK. It is full of disturbing facts: reoffending rates are around 27%, rising to 38% for those whose sentences are less than 12 months. The estimated cost of this social and justice system failure is between £9.5 billion and £13 billion every year. Depressing figures about a depressing reality. But although these facts provide a good background to Walker’s play, the drama is anything but an example of social realism. Burnt-Up Love’s vibe rings with the harsh inevitability of Ancient Greek tragedy rather than the more bland considerations of liberal journalism. It’s fictional, therefore more symbolically true than factual.

Walker both directs and acts in this production, which has a bare set by designed Juliette Demoulin, with pedestals where lit candles provide the only light in this dark tale. Running at a brisk 70 minutes, the play takes place in a crepuscular gloom which at first is irritating because you can’t see the faces of the actors clearly, and so their beautiful physical movements, choreographed by Billy Medlin, are almost ghostly. Gradually, this frustration recedes and the darkness of the setting draws you in like some underworld of black thoughts and bleak experiences. Walker has literally created a gateway into a different world, darker and more savage than any normal city street and flat. The prefect setting for a story that shows how violence is passed down the generations — socially not genetically.

Joining Walker, whose Mac is wryly monomaniacal, strong and fatalistic, are Joanne Marie Mason and Alice Walker. Mason’s Scratch has a fiercesome energy which is matched by Walker’s slightly more restrained but equally passionate JayJayJay. With their bodies creating physical sculptures, the young women dominate the stage, suggesting the depths of trauma as well as the joys of electric sex. At one point they dance with sparklers, at another they dash around in fury. Victims of care and Youth Offending institutions, the music by Uchenna Ngwe and Sheila Atim lifts their stories to the heights of romance and occasionally melodrama (in a good way). By the end, there’s a real feeling of redemption. Yes, Burnt-Up Love is that rare thing — a shining gem of a show.

• Burnt Up Love is at the Finborough Theatre until 23 November.