Coming-of-age story pays moving tribute to the power of music
Debris Stevenson remembers the exact moment when she first heard Dizzee Rascal’s seminal grime album Boy in da Corner. She was 13, a dyslexic, bullied, poetry-loving loner living with her strict Mormon mother in Ilford when a friend pushed a scuffed CD into her hands at school. Grime music, that fierce, uniquely British dance sound that first aired on London’s pirate radio stations and went mainstream with Dizzee Rascal’s Mercury Award-winning album, emerged from a Nineties underground fuelled by urban disfranchisement, street violence and adolescent despair, and for Stevenson, struggling with many of these things, as well as her sexuality, it changed her life.
Now a poetry academic, rapper and theatre-maker, Stevenson has used Rascal’s album as a springboard for a play-cum-gig about her life story, drawing on and reconfiguring several tracks alongside a few of her own. In a cast of four, Stacy Abalogun and Kirubel Belay double up as rapper MCS and various characters, including Stevenson’s pious mother, errant brother, school friends and lovers, while the real-life rapper and DJ Jammz plays the friend who introduced Stephenson to grime in the first place. He is black, Stevenson is white, and through their strained teenage friendship the show is particularly agile at confronting head-on its own fundamental problem, of a white girl using the music of black people to explore and express her own pain.
But it does so much more, too, with Stevenson’s break-neck lyrics passing deft comment on the entrenched feeling that the language of Shakespeare and Byron is more important than the rhythms of the street.
Ola Ince’s breathless production, making eloquent use of a revolve and minimal props including two neon-lit crucifixes that descend whenever Stevenson’s mother appears on stage, is both rough at the edges and piercingly incisive, while the subterranean bass ricocheting from the on-stage sound system can surely be heard the other side of Sloane Square.
In a moment when we risk being torn apart by culture wars, Poet
in da Corner – first premiered at the Royal Court in 2018 and now getting a deserved second run ahead of a UK tour – feels like a show for our times: not only bitingly aware of precisely these issues, but daringly inclusive, too.