Busking It – High Tide Festival, Walthamstow

Busking It at the High Tide Festival, Walthamstow (also runs at Shoreditch Town Hall from 9-20 October 2018).

Star rating: three and a half stars

Maybe I’m a bit of a grump but I would rather have a urinary tract infection than listen to most buskers on the Tube. The mass of commuters passing them at a brisk 4mph seems to offer prescient criticism. And yet, this cynical Londoner still does toss the odd coin to somebody torturing Bach, so they must have a place in our musical biosphere.

Busking It is a classy one-hour semi-autobiography of Danusia Samal’s ten-year stint as a busker on the Tube. A mere 18 when she started, she enacts the people and situations that she came across, the good, the bad and the weird – including a boyfriend who became all three.

Samal is immediately charming. She has the perfect stage presence and throughout her story you find yourself rooting for her. No doubt her magic and buoyant optimism is what you need to survive a decade of commuting Londoners.

She has a gift for mimicry which isn’t nasty or demeaning but really allows her to inhabit a cast of characters fluently and we get to grips with the nice, nasty and desperate in the commuting community.

She has a beautiful and capable singing voice – maybe again some of the singing is mimicry? – but it is compelling and moreish.  Her story is a London one, she is of Kurdish and Polish descent, she had an asylum-seeking stepdad, a right-on mother, music defined her identity and politics and she found love in a crowd and lost it in an airless room.

Minor cavils include a plot which loses its way – stuck on the Circle Line? – but for a show that originated in sketches narrative was going to be problematic.

But the biggest frustration – mentioned by a few in the audience – is that Samal who has a jazz voice with phrasing inflections of Amy Winehouse, Nina Simone and Sam Cook, doesn’t sing a whole song until the very end. Snatches of songs tease us into wanting the full expression of her sound. You are tantalised by what you hear… and then it stops and returns to the story, and occasionally the music is better than the story.

Samal is ably accompanied by Joe Archer on guitar, and Adam Cross, a one-man orchestra, who plays clarinet, accordion, keys, and a little bit of percussion (both are also credited as composers). Sarah Readman (lighting) does a brilliant job of re-creating the strobe effect of passing trains.

Overall this piece, directed by Guy Jones, has the feel of being unfinished but of great promise. Samal has the talent and graft to push through to make a memorable piece of musical theatre.

Kieran Falconer