Seldom if ever can Shakespeare’s Globe have looked less Elizabethan. Those period pillars were wrapped in enormous black bin bags. Behind them were pink neon lights advertising the “fantasy bar” below the stage. And in came street sweepers, a counter girl from McDonald’s, a bling-encrusted dude in a string vest, transvestites, tarts, junkies, a hot-dog seller and holy rollers whose chant of “Jesus gave me water” seemed especially apt as it was raining so hard that the groundlings had to wear those transparent coverings that make them look like giant condoms.

No, this wasn’t an updated revival of Measure for Measure, but maybe the best of the new plays I’ve yet seen at this address. Che Walker’s Frontline has its faults, but the play, the songs, Matthew Dunster’s superbly orchestrated production and an all-electric cast of 23 combine to bring to life the sleazy sub-world around Camden Underground station.

Jonathan Miller is among those who have deplored the decline of the neighbouring streets and he, I and probably Walker would agree that it’s not an area for growing children or civilised intellectuals. And sentimentality sometimes creeps into the overall picture, as it often does when writers are celebrating diversity, energy and resilience. Yet Walker, a moral but not moralising dramatist, knows how drugs can wreck lives – and, indeed, gives us a climax in which a young dope dealer is sadistically shot by the local Mr Big, a vicious racist played by Robert Gwilym. A climax and not a climax, for the overall idea is that the bustle of the human anthill continues regardless. This means that the play is impressionistic though not exactly plotless.

What will happen to Jo Martin’s tough Violet, who fancies the maddeningly meek bouncer at her lapdancing club, and her ditsy, sexy teenage daughter? Or to Lorraine Stanley’s Val and her children, one a failed boxer and the other a boy thug? Or to Beru Tessema’s disarmingly attractive pusher or Paul Copley as the local loony or Trystan Gravelle’s Mordechai, a fringe dramatist who makes increasingly desperate calls to some theatrical bigwig from a phone booth that a heroin addict regards as his dormitory?

It’s scattered stuff, not made easier to follow by the often overlapping dialogue, but lively, funny, extremely well written and with its serious, combative moments. Walker knows that London is a city of crack, knives, guns and conflict between, among others, Somalians and Ethopians. “We’re on the frontline with a broken heartbeat,” sing the cast – and the play proves them more or less right.

Box office: 020-7401 9919

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