Return

Rightly or wrongly, Battersea Arts Centre has been more
expansive in its programming for The Big Story, a month-long
celebration of storytelling in all its forms, headlined by Birmingham spoken-word
artist Polarbear and his one-man show, Return.

This is a performer with BBC Radio 1 airplay to his name –
and Radios 2, 3, 4 ,5 and 6 as it happens. The point being, he’s no Crick Crack
alumnus, a fact clear from the very start of this semi-autobiographical
account of Brummie boy made good, Noah, revisiting the neighbourhood
where he grew up.

The piece is an overt exercise in ‘spoken screenplay’, the
third person narrative punctuated by scene set-ups, flash-backs, jump-cuts and fades.
It’s effective stuff, particularly the close-ups –
the radioactive light cast on
the pavement by a streetlamp, the four spoons of sugar heaped into a cup of
tea –
building up a world as real in our mind’s eye as it is in his.

The characterisation is also strong: Noah’s jokey but
exposed dynamic with younger brother Dominic; his brief encounter with a former
classmate still working at the local supermarket; and his meeting with Eve, the
“one who got away” (if it weren’t for
the fact it was Noah who left in the first place). No drama here. Only the
realisation that the world he escaped is the world that made him who he is. And us, too. The geography is particular but the psychogeography universal. And the 90s pop cultural references (Baby D tracks, Steven Seagal movies) resonate
more keenly than a host of Homeric heroes.

Easy to draw comparisons with fellow Birmingham export Mike
Skinner of The Streets. The two certainly share the storyteller’s sensibility and attention to
detail. The wonder is that Polarbear achieves it without a note of
music, his unobtrusive delivery creating a cumulative effect instead. As he puts it, he comes
from a place where everyone’s a talker but no one a writer, a place where people are nourished on a “soup
of stories”. Return
is soupy, too, but in a good way.