Review: FRANKIE FOXSTONE A.K.A. THE PROFIT: WALKING TOUR, VAULT Festival

Young property developer Frankie Foxstone has her eyes on the Waterloo area. With an over-the-top personality, a politician's attitude, and sharp ruthlessness she takes her audience on a walking tour of Leake Street explaining how she's working on gentrifying it even more than it already is.

With plans to substitute The Vaults itself with an immense underground parking lot and to evict the families who live in the nearby council flats, Amy Gwilliam's character paints the perfect, unsettling picture of what would happen if a certain group of people were to have full decisional power. She speaks of the growth of London in the past and how Waterloo needs to regain to the global presence stolen by the likes of King's Cross St. Pancreas.

From arranging the participants according to the assets they own to dividing them between homeowners and renters, the idea is smart and subtle in its goals. The socio-political undertones are generally there to be picked up, but on the night the United Kingdom stopped being part of the EU her talks of non-existent borders fall flat and the audience's political rebuffs are incessantly glossed over.

While the core concept comes through loud and clear, the show is too imperfect and unsound to stand the test of Leake Street on a Friday evening. Although Gwilliam is wearing a portable speaker connected to a headset microphone, it's irritatingly hard to hear her through the noise and her addresses don't all fulfil their potential.

The promenade nature - crucial for the realisation of the piece - here is unfortunately impacting its reception. Gwilliam, however, is unflappable in her portrayal. Fake smiles and over-zealous manners, she is successfully disturbing. She stands tall on her step stool highlighting the class divide between the patrons and siding with a specific slice of public but, ultimately, has them all making fools of themselves rotating on the spot like goods on display.

Frankie Foxstone a.k.a. The Profit: Walking Tour runs at VAULT Festival until 2 February.

To post a comment, you must register and login.