Poems lift charming but unvaried night
An Evening With An Immigrant
Bridge Theatre, London HHH✩✩ by CLAIRE ALLFREE
TO BE invited to Buckingham Palace is surreal enough; to be invited when the Home Office has just turned down your asylum application verges on the farcical. No wonder playwright Inua Ellams, attending a Palace reception on the back of his success as a poet, spent half of it expecting someone from border control to whisk him away.
Ellams, 35, whose family have lived in Britain and Ireland since escaping religious persecution in Nigeria in 1996, had three acclaimed plays put on at the National Theatre. But after years of immigration wrangles it’s clear he feels his adopted country’s relationship with him is conditional – he’s just not sure on what.
His has been a life of leaving communities – in Nigeria, London and Dublin – and he tells his story of a search for a place to call home with charm and beguiling warmth.
Ellams intersperses memories of his white best friend explaining to him what racism is, and the brotherhood he found on the baseball pitch, with lissom, often semi-autobiographical poems. Among the most touching is one celebrating his parents’ marriage.
Throughout runs a love for poetry and hip-hop, lending a muscular musicality to almost every line.
He’s great company, yet this 90minute show needs more variation. And as it lapses into broadsides on the rise of nationalism, it feels like a waste of his gifts as a storyteller.