Sometimes you have to leave the place where you were born and raised in order to find yourself – but the further away you get, the more you find that you have carried it with you. The musician and theatre-maker Matt Regan, alias Little King, hasn’t lived in Belfast for five years but he can still smell the sea and feel the salty wind on his face. He makes us think that we have felt and smelled it too. He also makes us think about what we have tried to escape, and what we take with us on the journeys we make.
Belfast is in Regan’s bones as if the sleech – that oozing sludge upon which the city is built – has seeped into his body. There is nothing pretty about Regan’s evocation of his native city, but there are moments of exquisite beauty in this indefinable and utterly distinctive show that makes a mockery of all the old boundary-defining labels such as “gig”, “theatre” and “spoken word”, or indeed “pop” and “classical music”. The songs of Belfast bands the Undertones and Stiff Little Fingers are woven into a score that is beautifully played by the Cairn String Quartet.
Greater Belfast touches upon the Peace Lines, the Millies who worked in the linen factories, the Ulster museum and the T word (actually, that’s the Titanic not the Troubles). But it’s no history lesson, rather an evocation of place and meaning, the geography of the psyche and the way the future is built upon the past.
The production by Claire Willoughby is exquisitely lit in a design by Simon Hayes that sometimes blinds us and sometimes seems to be lighting the way ahead. Regan offers up a fragmentary and tender portrait of place that is delivered with a hesitancy that is as if he is thinking out loud and discovering what he really feels about his native city, and his relationship to it, in the very act of performing.
Of course he’s not, it’s a studied conceit and one that is sometimes a little over-egged, in a production that would benefit from a more informal setting. Nonetheless it is effective in the way it suggests that when words fail, the music must take over. And there is plenty else to commend, including the impetus that sees Regan admitting that “where I come from is a bit shit” – and his yearning to nevertheless find the greater good in it. He can’t bury his past, because his own future depends upon it.
This is a love letter to Belfast in all its mucky beauty. Apparently oysters are sometimes spotted in the sleech. Regan has dived right in and come up with a little pearl.
•At the Traverse, Edinburgh, to 28 August. Box office: 0131-228 1404
