Build it up, knock it down: Amy Gwilliam, as Frankie Foxtone, leads us, and a bemused on-looking Peter, around Croydon town centre
I’m standing in the “bar quarter” of Croydon, as a hard-hatted, power-dressed Frankie Foxtone points out yet another abandoned building development in Croydon, this time the Nestlé Tower, and tells us of her “ambitious” plans for the centre of town.
She is keen, she says, to get our input. Foxtone bills herself as a “perfectly poised and ruthless property developer… Famous for award-winning schemes in Marbella and Slough… She’ll change your life, and your postcode”. She is the darkly comic creation of performer Amy Gwilliam.
This is no faux-consultation by real-life property developers Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, but rather a faux-faux-consultation by a fictional friend of Mayor Jason Perry.
It’s a metaphor: Frankie leads us through the largely abandoned shopping mall
The performance, which lasts about an hour, takes us on a walking tour from its start in “Studio 55” (previously Unit 55) in the bowels of the Centrale Shopping Centre, to the Town Hall, where we are promised a meeting with the Mayor himself.
In order to secure this meeting, Frankie – also known as “The Profit”, geddit? – tells us, she has had to network. She has lunched with influential people. She has dined with them. She has breakfasted with them.
She met Perry, she claims, at MIPIM, the annual junket in Cannes for anyone who might want to invest in real estate, many of them local council executives on the public dollar.
She doesn’t say if she shared a croissant with him, but she does more than hint at a game of strip poker.
This is the tail-end of the first Croydonites Fringe, a curtain-raiser for the Croydonites Festival proper, a rather impressive-looking line-up of performances of every imaginable genre showing from November 6 to 24. Most of them are in the pop-up “Studio 55”, easily accessible from the Centrale tram stop entrance. Others are at other central Croydon venues.
If Gwilliam’s performance is anything to go by, the standard is high indeed.
Off to meet the Mayor: Katharine Street has never seen anything quite like it
Back then, to Frankie, pausing her audience by Foxtons, the estate agents, and encouraging us to get into order of our assets. She has made a point of learning our names so that she can condescend personally to each of us individually.
There is no shame, she says to the person at the back of the line, in having few assets. That person is me. I look with no shame but some envy on those at the front, the owners of four-bedroom houses with large gardens in the south of the borough.
We are interrupted by Peter, a passer-by who appears curious as to what this group of hi-viz wearers are doing and, finding a ready-mixed audience, takes the chance to tell us of his own dealings with Jason Perry and Croydon Council. This, it seems, is one of the perils of street theatre.
That Gwilliam is able to engage with Peter as he tags along with us, keen to confront the Mayor, and treat him with care and indeed kindness is to her credit. He even joins in with the part where we are each asked to imagine ourselves as new Croydon buildings.
This part feels like a real-life faux consultation.
Jason? Where are you?: Frankie Foxtone finds herself shut out of the Town Hall
When we reach the Town Hall, Frankie asks one of her entourage to hold her bag, another to take her mic. Then, “Emma, take my coat”.
In an instant, Frankie reveals the scantiest of undergarments, surely inappropriate for a meeting with the Executive Mayor. Or perhaps she is planning on tempting him to another game of strip poker?
Alas, when she tries to enter the Town Hall, the door is locked. It seems she has breakfasted in vain and the show is over as we, the citizens of Croydon, realise that we have been taken for a ride. It was fun while it lasted, though.
Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield should sign her up.
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