There is a wonderful sense of release as Inua Ellams runs freely around the stage in Nigerian traditional dress (the only person at the Bridge without a face mask). He has such warmth and energy that it is a tonic to be back in the theatre and hear him talk. It is going to be a low-budget show, he laughs, gesturing at a big black suitcase – his only prop.
Ellams’s autobiographical monologue describes leaving Nigeria aged 12 for Dublin and London. Staged at Edinburgh in 2017 by the Fuel theatre company, it involves buoyant shifts of tone between talk and poetry. Ellams is a poet, a playwright (Barber Shop Chronicles his biggest hit at the National) and an ebullient raconteur. This is his story, but he is unpushily polemical on behalf of others trapped in the UK’s immigration system. The scandalous treatment of his family is not a one-off: a backlog of 500,000 immigration cases is, he says, gathering dust.
He confides that he comes from a “long line of troublemakers”. But on his chest (once his trad attire is shed) is the text Never Forget to Say Thank You – not obviously a troublemaker’s T-shirt. When times got tough (he was the only black pupil in a Dublin school where racism was rife), Ellams never gave way to self-pity. Laughing at himself is still his forte, and he is irresistible. There were good things in Ireland, too: he learned about John Keats and Eminem – simultaneously. The poems he recites are conversational, entertaining and moving. His feeling for family is disarming – a wonderful poem celebrates his parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. His father was a Muslim, his mother a Christian. He prayed to both Gods with “similar enthusiasm”. You can tell from his gifts: he is doubly blessed.
• An Evening With an Immigrant is at the Bridge, London SE1, until 31 October
