Review Roundup: AN EVENING WITH AN IMMIGRANT at The Bridge Theatre

Written and performed by Inua Ellams, The Bridge presents Ellams' and Fuel's production of An Evening with an Immigrant, with music selection by DJ Sid Mercutio.

Performances run through October 15.

Born to a Muslim father and a Christian mother in what is now considered by many to be Boko Haram territory, Inua Ellams left Nigeria for England in 1996 aged 12, moved to Ireland for three years, before returning to London and starting work as a writer and graphic designer. Littered with poems, stories and anecdotes, Ellams will tell his ridiculous, fantastic, poignant immigrant-story of escaping fundamentalist Islam, directing an arts festival at his college in Dublin, performing solo shows at The National Theatre and drinking wine with the Queen of England, all the while without a country to belong to or place to call home.

Let's see what the critics are saying...

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Howard Loxton, British Theatre Guide: In sharing his personal story, Inua Ellams is both amusing and moving and occasionally emotional. Although four years since he presented the first version of this show, the situation is no easier for those many migrants of whom he reminds us.

Clive Davis, The Times: There's no shortage of incident in this 90-minute piece, first seen in 2017 and now part of the Bridge's season of monologues. The creator of that compelling and often humorous slice of black diaspora life, Barber Shop Chronicles, Ellams explains how his family escaped Nigeria's religious divisions and, while fighting a long battle with British immigration officials, built a new life in London.

Sam Marlow, iNews: His poems, threading through his family history like quicksilver, are wondrously vivid, inflected with the hip-hop rhymes he came to love as a teenager. As his mother "lets dusk slip into her voice" to tell the young Inua a bedtime story, her breath tickles our cheek.

Aleks Sierz, The Arts Desk: Produced by Fuel, An Evening with an Immigrant is an extended poetry reading, with some light sounds from DJ Sid Mercutio, which casts the spotlight brightly on Ellams, highlighting his effortless charm, a mixture of pointed anecdotes and chuckles, occasionally spontaneous but for the most part well-worked out and much practised. He is both confident and seductive, eloquent and graceful, radiating joy and provoking sympathetic laughter.

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage: He makes us see it from his point of view, to understand the human cost and suffering behind the statistics. The fact that he can talk about it all with such humour, warmth and gentle defiance, is a triumph of the human spirit as well as of a poetic soul.

Ava Wong Davies, LondonTheatre.co.uk: Like his poetry, An Evening With an Immigrant is rarely florid, but wears its lyricism and musicality lightly, letting it ripple into every corner of the theatre, aided by Sid Mercutio's laid-back sound design. The cumulative power of the performance almost sneaks up on you - so charismatic and conversational is Ellams's stage presence that when the final few minutes come, their polemical power is akin to a tidal wave.

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