Luke Wright

There’s a darkness at the heart of Luke Wright’s new show. Nestled among the linguistic pugilism and 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 Essex campers 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, as he spits out visceral, inventive verse that sweats, bleeds and sings.