Review: JOE STRUMMER TAKES A WALK, Cervantes Theatre

Dead at 50, Joe Strummer, lead singer of The Clash, never lived long enough to become Morrissey, for his iconoclastic attitude to curdle into a twisted misanthropy. He lives on in our imaginations as the self-confessed 'Punk Rock Warlord', the leader of the band with the cojones not to sell out, who never did Top of the Pops, who embraced all kinds of music (even disco) and who called an album Sandanista.

Juan Alberto Salvatierra's play (in a virtuoso translation by L. Finch) takes us to Spain, where Strummer is in a reflective mood, proud of what his band accomplished, reeling off the names of the A list celebrities who visited their dressing rooms, but aware that the band are breaking up - musical differences, Topper Headon's heroin addiction and the sheer getting on the bloody nerves of each other - and unsure of what the future might hold. He is in a ravine in Viznar searching for the body of his hero, the poet and playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca, shot 49 years earlier by a fascist death squad and forgotten in his own country, the memories of the civil war still too raw. This happened.

Robert Bradley gives us a Strummer who is angry, proud, contemplative, didactic, fragile, forthright and, perhaps more than anything for a warlord, human. At times, Bradley speaks like a teenager, at times like a superstar, at times like a broken old man - there comes a point when we are all those things rolled into one, it's just that some of us never see it. Told through a series of monologues and surreal visions, Bradley holds our attention, a performer performing a performer, without ever toppling into caricature.

We hear glimpses of familiar songs - "Spanish Bombs" of course, but also "Jimmy Jazz" and "The Magnificent Seven" - some with inexplicably slightly incorrect lyrics, but, like Strummer himself when his band were fracturing, the force of the lyrics and attack of the tunes are gone, but the beauty remains.

Ultimately what emerges is the specific story of a specific man and his quest to find meaning for his life through resurrecting the body, and hence the spirit of the poet who did not back down when the police were on his back. But there's also a general story too about the lives we live within our lives, the identities we assume, the heroes we choose - and how we never quite find them.

Joe Strummer Takes A Walk is at the Cervantes Theatre until 16 October

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