Boy In Da Korma is an hour-long solo piece performed by its writer, Jaisal Marmion, in which he engages the audience as Liam, a 17-year-old Irish lad who lives in Skibbereen, a town in the west of County Cork, who is the son of a local girl and an Indian father. He has dreams of becoming a rap star and sees himself as the reincarnation of American rapper Tupak Shakur, who was murdered in Los Angeles in 1997.
Liam is a relatively shy boy, picked on by racist school bully Shane, but gains confidence when he thinks of himself as Tupac, but even that can go wrong. When Shane puts him down, challenging him with “who do you think you are?” he finds himself saying “Tupac” with the result that his classmates, led by the bully, now call him 2Paki.
Mom thinks rap is just a row, and his cornet-playing grandad isn’t keen, but it is music so he’s supportive. When Liam discovers there’s a talent competition in Cork that conveniently coincides with a school trip going there, granddad even comes up with the entry fee, but again fate takes a wrong turn.
Marmion makes Liam open and honest; you can’t help but like the boy. His brogue stops his rap from being too fast to keep up, unlike some rappers, and there’s a soulful rendering of a local folksong (his grandfather’s favourite) about the potato famine, but it is the reality he gives Liam that holds the audience. He also voices all the other characters as he smoothly introduces them.
On a stage almost bare, just a guitar and a chair, Ben Grant’s production concentrates on direct engagement. It unobtrusively keeps things moving, with Douglas Bakers’s video projections adding visual elements to fit specific locations.
Boy In Da Korma is a funny but moving study of someone who, though faced with racism, wants to belong among his peers though dreaming of success in the wide world, and it fits perfectly into Jermyn Street’s Footprints Festival of short works. You can take the title quite literally—but you’ll have to see it, I’m not going to say why.