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Love, Labour and 80s indie: the personal gets political for Luke Wright

Delivered entirely in verse, Wright’s coming-of-age tale Frankie Vah is set in Thatcher’s Britain but the debate is as relevant as ever

What happens if you love your parents but loathe their politics? In Frankie Vah, the second verse play written and performed by Luke Wright, Frankie struggles to reconcile his father’s “Christian empathy” as a vicar with the fact that he puts a cross next to Margaret Thatcher’s name at the ballot box. Frankie abandons the vicarage for a life on the road as a radical left punk poet. The dog collar is traded in for a pair of DMs.

Before the show begins, a spool of TV footage from the 1980s unfurls on the wall: flitting images of Spitting Image, Neil Kinnock falling into the sea and a post-Falklands Thatcher triumphant atop a tank.

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