Singing in the Rain

It just had to rain.

I'd picked up a standing ticket for a fiver at Shakespeare's Globe, which while giving you the best view going, is a guaranteed paddling pool when it pisses it. But when you're watching Che Walker's Frontline, a play set on the streets of Camden Town, you wouldn't want it any other way.

A junkie curled up on a cardboard box, a needle entering his arm half a yard from my left shoulder. I watched his all-too-realistic injection up close, and with waterlogged shoes and my trousers soaked through, empathised (in a horribly privileged, middle-class way) with everybody in London who had to sleep on the streets that night. It was powerful theatre.

I feared the worst kind of yoof entertainment, a hackneyed attempt to write about the streets. But the cast of 'invisibles', the kind of people you don't notice or purposefully try to avoid, were rich, three-dimensional characters. The first half overflows with youthful energy, as an assortment of Jesus freaks, prostitutes, lap dancers, bouncers, boxers, demented pensioners, drug dealers, desperate actors and Scottish hot dog vendors compete for our attention. But the second half is more committed to telling a story, and the final scene, in which an Ethiopian dealer is murdered, is moving.