Luke Wright brings ferocious, award-winning poetry to The Edge Theatre

Later this month, renegade spoken word artist and 2021 Saboteur Award-winner Luke Wright brings his all-new show to The Edge Theatre in Chorlton with a bitterly funny array of meditations on the modern social climate.

Pandemic politics, creaky relatives and, of course, the culture war—the ‘lockdown bard’ has an endless supply of arrows in his quiver to aim at the new decade’s looming targets. 

Wright arrives at The Edge on Thu 21 Apr, in the wake of rave reviews from across the artistic spectrum. Where punk legend Patti Smith notes his ‘cool poems’, local icon John Cooper Clarke—for whom Wright regularly opens—simply suggests that ‘he must be on some kind of dope.’

Wright’s Chorlton performance will be the twentieth date of his current tour, on which TheReviewsHub describes him ‘blending light and shade’ as the poet with ‘helpless rage and real tenderness’. 

Summing up his own approach to the art in a Q&A with the theatre, Wright explained: “I write a lot about England. I’m still trying to get under the fingernails of this country. Trying to understand what it means to be English. I also write a lot about myself, my own personal journey (I don’t like that phrase, but you know what I mean).

“My work is part political, part confessional. The songwriter and novelist (and frontman of the excellent Mountain Goats) John Darnielle said recently that he thinks that all writing is in some confessional—that you always reveal something of yourself, even if you write about political issues and characters. I agree with that. Doing poems on stage there is always a balance of the two—the way you frame a poem, how you introduce it, on stage can greatly change the way the audience receives it. I use a lot of humour when framing even serious poems. Why not be funny I always think, but it also keeps the show fun and light so you can afford yourself more serious moments.”

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