New Writing at the Globe

This year the Globe is premiering two expansive works:

The Frontline

by Ché Walker

6 July - 17 August

'The brusque, bathetic poetry of back-street Camden is walker’s lingua franca. Flesh and blood and honour are his themes' Time Out on Flesh Wound

Saturday night outside Camden tube; god, strip bars, weed, crack, lost old men, unemployed actors and vegans all collide in a riptide of chaos on the streets of London. There’s Beth the reformed Christian and Erkenwald the hot-dog seller, old Ragdale on a quest to find his daughter, Mordechai Thurrock the actor-playwright and egomaniac, and Cockburn, Elliot and Clayton the dealers and junkies, whose trade both sustains and destroys the lives of those around them.

In this vibrant and blackly comic new play, a dozen private stories emerge, and their voices give utterance to a storm of subjects and feelings: pop culture and sexual fantasy, the ruins of empire and the delusions of religion, foreign oil and prehistoric London. Ché Walker, winner of the George Devine Award, and regular playwright for the Royal Court, brings to the Globe stage a panorama of contemporary London, encompassing the cruel and the tender, the gutter and the stars.

Contains bad language, and strong content.

Liberty

by Glyn Maxwell

31 August - 4 October

Director: Guy Retallack

'Glyn Maxwell is the best dramatic poet now at work in English' Daily Telegraph

April 1793, the French Revolution is four years old and the Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre finds threats to national liberty at home and abroad. When Gamelin, an ambitious and idealistic young magistrate, joins a group of old friends for a picnic outside Paris, the ties of love and affection can take the strain. But how strong will they prove when Gamelin is given power over life and death, and the new republic plunges from high idealism to mob rule and state terror?

Private jealousies and public fears, old alliances and new ideologies, panic legislation and political correctness all combine in this thrilling adaptation of Anatole France’s 1912 novel Les Dieux ont Soif. The poet Glyn Maxwell (whose Lifeblood was voted best play by the British Theatre Guide in 2005) brings a colloquial verse of great fluidity and immediacy to a story that is both fresh and relevant.

A co-production with Lifeblood Theatre Company.

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