Greater Belfast

Composer/writer: Matt Regan Director: Claire Willoughby

I stumbled off the train from London to Edinburgh and straight into Greater Belfast – the kind of show that festivals are invented for, said Sarah Crompton on Whatsonstage. com. A Belfast native, Matt Regan has written, composed and performs a one-hour show that redraws the lines between spoken word, theatre piece and gig. Accompanied by a string quartet, Regan creates a “hymn of memory” to Belfast – a city that he hasn’t lived in for more than a decade. The result is “weird and wondrous and haunting”; an hour to “wrap up in your heart and remember for a long while”.

There is nothing pretty about Regan’s evocation of his native city, said Lyn Gardner in The Guardian, but there are “moments of exquisite beauty” in this indefinable and “utterly distinctive” show. Through music and lyrics, Regan makes it clear that 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 you’ve carried it with you. Belfast is in his bones, as if the “sleech” – that “oozing sludge upon which the city is built” – has seeped into his body. And through him, we feel that we too have “felt and smelled the city”. His delivery is hesitant, as though his discoveries have emerged from the very act of performing, but it’s a “studied conceit” and “a little over-egged”.

The city of Belfast “eludes easy categorisation”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph, and the same is true of this show, a sort of “latterday Under Milk Wood”. Flirting and teasing, stopping and starting, Regan describes a city that has gone “from shite to all right”. He touches on the Troubles, the “Millies” (linen mill workers) and the Ulster Museum, while the accompanying string quartet, “by turns soothing and agitated”, assists his lyricism, “dropping in bomblets of textural surprise”.

This is a love letter in all its mucky beauty, said Gardner. Apparently, oysters are sometimes spotted in the sleech. “Regan has dived right in and come up with a little pearl.”