Burnt Up Love
Finborough Theatre

CHE WALKER, who writes, directs and stars in Burnt Up Love at the Finborough is such an old hand as playwright, director and performer that we immediately know where we are. He knows what he’s setting out to do and delivers with confidence.

Mac is a prisoner, serving 20 years for murder. What keeps him going is his profound love for the daughter he last saw when she was three and a half. Her crumpled photograph on his wall is the light that illuminates the desperate darkness of cell life. And when he finally gets out, he goes to look for her.

The dramatic collision of dream with reality is inevitable. For, over the years, Mac has constructed in his mind a tale of social elevation and success for his girl. In the real world, however, the long arms of violence and the criminal underworld have reached far beyond the confines of his own cell, and they have mangled his daughter’s life as uncompromisingly as they have his own. Her attempt at a lesbian relationship with petty criminal Jayjayjay is doomed.  Even her name — Scratch — is hard and grating. No easy happy ending is on the cards when brutality and self-loathing are etched into Scratch’s psyche.

The work is timely, capturing for an audience the depth and scale of the task of prisoner rehabilitation. Not only is reoffending almost a certainty as the play demonstrates, but all connected with the prisoner share the carnage. 

The whole piece runs just over an hour. Five flickering candelabras replace stage lights, creating an unstable, sinister atmosphere in the small performance space. Candles are lit and extinguished throughout the play by the three actors to coincide with their own feelings of clarity, gloom or despair. Uchenna Ngwe’s original music with keyboard and strings adds to the unease, while splendid choreography by Billy Medlin transforms bare boards into a place of fear and crisis.  

The style of the piece is exclusively Walker’s, not least in the streams of poetic language that pour from the characters’ mouths, switching seamlessly from self-revealing monologue to interactive dialogue with a natural ease.

And it is in these monologues that the playwright excels, and so much so that dramatic action takes second place to the writer’s words. As a result, the piece is more epic poem than play: a snapshot captured in a freeze frame, a painting hanging in a gallery, a dark vision laid out to haunt us.  

Walker as Mac captures our hearts. Joanne Marie Mason embodies Scratch’s beauty and pain, and Alice Walker brings us a vibrant Jayjayjay, with whom Scratch might have experienced love if only she were able to grow beyond initial sexual desire.  

Altogether it’s a short, sharp shock, leaving us wanting more. There is depth, but it serves to reveal a simple status quo rather than the dramatic character development of a fully fledged play. This is an exhibit, not a full-blown narrative. 

But beautifully acted, it is a vivid, compassionate portrait of those pinioned in the criminal underclass. 

Runs until November 23. Box Office: 020 7244 7439, finboroughtheatre.co.uk