Joanne Marie Mason and Alice Walker. Photo Credit: Rio Redwood-Sawyerr
Simon Jenner, November 1st 2024
Adjusting to life outside after 20 years is challenging. Knowing how the child inside the photograph of your three-year-old daughter might have developed is another. Ché Walker writes, acts in and directs the premiere of Burnt-Up Love at the Finborough till November 23rd.
Crispin Horner’s wide-ranging programme essay details what organisations help rehabilitation and try to offer the scant support there is, to reduce reoffending, indeed suffering. Walker’s play confronts what might trigger past reflexes to deal with the present of what someone else has triggered.
Juliette Demoulin’s set is miraculously simple. Five sets of candles lit, snuffed and relit throughout the performance of just 70 minutes is everything: bar a couple of sparklers. Billy Medlin’s choreography runs through this play like a muscle of water: so moments of visionary stillness are punctuated with bursts of wildcat release, and a stylised intimacy out of modern ballet. Lovers mirror each other’s ecstasy like a live Rorschach blot.
Ché Walker. Photo Credit: Rio Redwood-Sawyerr
Uchenna Ngwe’s original music, (with additional original music by Sheila Atim) unsettles and consoles, often at contradictory moments. Their soundscape is disturbed but lyrical, thrubbing distress or premonition.
Mac (Ché Walker) relates in an opening monologue – mesmerically, as if picking through words – how that photograph has already cost him ten years. That’s when a “lump’” of a new jailor tried crumpling it. Walker is as you’d expect consummate. He also happens to look the part.
His poignant litany of what he tells others his daughter has become (“pianist, drama-teacher, UN translator, violinist, care-worker, star, physician, bookshop-owner, poet, MP”) takes on the weight of where we’ve been when repeated 65 minutes later.
We switch to Scratch (Joanne Marie Mason): exuberant, dangerous, pumped up to fight and sneering at men she sleeps with for cash or to lift their wallets. And she’s just scornfully dumped a man who was too soft, too loving. Mason’s visceral reach, the sheer velocity of her Scratch is as compelling as Ché Walker’s.
Scratch’s headlong career is stalled one midnight when she meets someone almost as wild as her: is picked up in a stolen car by JayJayJay (Alice Walker). JayJayJay thrills Scratch by letting that car roll down a hill to crash into a Greek restaurant, and they instantly become lovers.
Alice Walker layers JayJayJay as both wild, and increasingly brings out her core of stability and nurture set as much by finding Scratch, just as Scratch might react from that. Mason and Walker are riveting, with each other or alone.
Joanne Marie Mason and Alice Walker. Photo Credit: Rio Redwood-Sawyerr
There’s comic asides when Scratch adds in one of the glancing fourth-walls that stud this work: “I wasn’t a lesbian yet.” There’s frequent ripples of poetry. JayJayJay describes Scratch’s face: “half liquid shadow, half rose in candle-flame.” Both characters release their vulnerability as they spark and spar, shimmy and snatch at each other. JayJayJay’s past might be troubled, but she’s instinctively reaching for sanctuary, a life. Scratch doesn’t know what that is: to her stability might spell death and her violence compass sticks magnetic north. It’s clear that’s where her genes are.
This deliriously happy interlude can’t last, not the way Scratch is. After a brief interlude where Mac searches his daughter out and is told to find someone with singular marks, it’s clear Scratch doesn’t know what to do beyond her first erotic high. Not yet. She withdraws, doesn’t wash, takes duvet months as normal.
When she returns to claim her gear from her ex-lover, he makes a gesture: she can prevent or enable it. The outfall is explosive. The man’s brother and thugs try hunting JayJayJay and Mac catches up with her. The denouement though is when Scratch, Mac and some others meet in the bar.
In another monologue striking in the deliberation Ché Walker invests it, Mac has to redeem the time. And in a singular way, one society won’t accept. Others including Scratch and JayJayJay might feel differently. There’s an encounter just after truncated in words so we don’t know all that’s said, but in one terrible redemption, we infer a debt of life is paid.
In the very best sense, this feels vaster and longer than its 70 vertiginous minutes. JayJayJay often tells Scratch she’s not judging. Though at one point that’s hard. One of the very finest three-handers I’ve seen for a long time, Burnt-Up Love refuses to judge and nor will anyone left reeling after seeing this. Stunning.
Joanne Marie Mason. Photo Credit: Rio Redwood-Sawyerr
Written, acted in and directed by Ché Walker
Original Music Uchenna Ngwe, Additional Original Music Sheila Atim, Set and Lighting Designer, Juliette Demoulin, Choreography Billy Medlin, Stage Manager Lev Govororovski, Producer Kit Thompson
Associate Directors Benjamin Isaac, Jack Medlin, Mo Sesay, Production Photography Rio Redwood-Sawyerr
Kit Thompson in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre
General Manager Jillian Feuerstein, Assistant General Manager, Kit Thompson
Thanks to Jonathan Chambers, Faz Kemp at Sam Wanamaker Theatre, Steve Medlin and Team at College Arts, Matthew Dunster, Natasha Rickman, Otis Cameron-Carr and John Leonard.
