Textual Assault

You may not have noticed it yet, but language has begun to attack us. Assailed by the cereal packet early in the morning and then by the telly ads late at night, we’re bombarded by poor prose day in, day out. During the Festival, things get even worse: Fringe flyers strike from all directions and posters vie for our attention. Even human bodies are recast as promotional tools, sporting t-shirts emblazoned with cliché-laden captions. There is no escape from crap writing.

This is the theme of acclaimed performance-poet Luke Wright’s latest show, which critiques the junk literature that saturates our lives by parodying the worst of everyday writing. From labels on shampoo bottles to coffee packets and spam, no crude attempts at word-mongering escape the young comedian's beady eyes.
A cursory glance at a typical Edinburgh pavement this month would surely provide Wright and his co-star Joel Stickley with reams of Fringe-related material, but the Festival veteran is reluctant to deride the flyers of other performers.

“I’d feel a bit bad because nearly always the worst flyers are for the really amateur productions,” the 26-year-old explains, his rapid speech as energized in conversation as it is in performance. “I know what it's like to turn up and be smashed into submission. But with all those drama school luvvies you do kind of want to.”
Wright prefers instead to target corporate branding. “Adverts in particular really offend me,” he says. “I know everyone hates them but I'm genuinely morally upset about how bad they are and how much we have to look at them.”

A shared antipathy for junk mail, a loathing of advertising and a talent for satire prompted Wright and fellow poet Stickley to co-author Who Writes this Crap?, a book published last year that parodies the dubious writing found in everyday life.
In their show of the same name the duo perform 25 excerpts from the book alongside six mock lectures on themes such as the “matey branding” tactics of Innocent Smoothies and Barclays. The two-man show marks the second Fringe collaboration for the pair, who previously enjoyed success as part of award-winning poetry collective Aisle16.

“There is a vast amount of bad writing around and I said to Joel we'd have so much fun ripping into it,” says Wright, who preferred composing shorter excerpts such as slogans and corporate spiel. “I invented this mobile phone brand for the show which I thought was really good,” he says. “When I finished it I thought ‘I could sell this!’”

Wright’s knack for marketing comes as no surprise considering the young poet once worked for the dark side. His parody owes much of its realism to three months spent thinking up “bollocks” for an advertising company where one memorable project was to market the Bible.
“As a fervent atheist it was something of a trial,” Wright recalls, “it went against every fibre of my being.” How did he sell it? “The Good News just got better.”

Many of the ideas in the show were inspired by writing the pair have come across in daily life, and Wright claims to have found gems in the most unlikely of places.
“I went to the chipshop last night,” he says, “and I was looking at all the flyers they've got on the wall when I spotted an advert for 'Molebusters'. Though the caption read ‘Who you gonna call... Molebusters!’ they had signed it off ‘Yours Sincerely’, like a letter. It was just sweetly inept.”

Anecdotes like this pepper Wright’s speech – which incidentally rattles along at 400 words per minute, literally twice that of an ordinary human – and bare his sweet tooth for stories.

And only with his double speed will he make it through this Fringe, which showcases not just one but three separate shows bearing his signature. He'll perform ten brand new poems in A Poet's Work is Never Done and plans to spend his spare minutes directing The Mid Nineties La La La, a free poetry-cum-comedy show.

Though he's not yet cracked the mainstream, as his heavy Festival workload might suggest, Wright has certainly received enough glittering reviews to splash elegy all over his posters. But this is just another use – or abuse – of language he plans to rip in to.

“We're beginning Who Writes this Crap? with fake press cuts we wrote for the book,” he gleefully explains. “In the manner of many a Fringe programme description we'll claim it's been praised as ‘a book... which seems... good.’

He may be assailed by poor prose but Wright's got the enemy firmly in his sights. And with the aid of a sharpened quill, he's preparing to fight back.