Little Brother hit the news last week when Ibrahima Balde, the man whose memoir this show is based upon, was denied a UK visa in order to attend the premiere. The Jermyn Street Theatre were outraged at the irony here. Balde’s book is about his journey from Guinea in West Africa to find his missing brother on the migrant trail to Europe; for him to be denied entry to a country putting on his play about the dehumanising aspect of migrancy was something of a hollow joke.
And in fact after a campaign by the theatre, the Home Office reversed their decision. Balde didn’t make it over in time for the first showing but is apparently on his way, and certainly the incident added extra electricity to the evening, not least because it ended with a cast member reading out the Visa rejection letter. The political shadow of increasing anti-migrant rhetoric looms large.
But what precedes this ending is no political sermon. Adapted from the book by Timberlake Wertenbaker, it is a defiant, powerful and often joyful story where the humanity behind the statistics is revealed.
And quite honestly, how director Stella Powell-Jones and her team have managed to tell such an epic odyssey in this famously tiny theatre is near-miraculous, an efficient, flowing feat of staging and lighting and movement.
Blair Gyabaah plays Ibrahima as an effervescent kid, happy, warm, a child who will do anything for other people, but has to work from a young age to help support his family after his father dies. Gyabaah makes for an engaging host for the story, addressing the audience eye-to-eye, which makes what follows all the more heartbreaking. His brother leaves home and goes missing, and as Ibrahima travels across countries to find him – walking across deserts, working on building sites, falling into the hands of human traffickers, tortured in slave markets, hitching lifts on motorbikes, trucks and dinghies – we slowly see the smile worn from his face, the glint in his eye dimmed.
Around him are a cast of four playing a cast of hundreds: Mo Sesay as Ibrahima’s father, and various bus drivers and truckers; Ivan Oyik as allies along the way but particularly haunting as the Little Brother of the title; Whitney Kehinde bringing warmth as Ibrahima’s mother and tragedy as a young woman who collapses in the desert; and Youness Bouzinab, who has a neat line in Kalashnikov-wielding guards as well as the co-writer of the book, Amets Arzallus Antia, to whom Ibrahima tells his tale.
It is a dazzling display of chameleon acting, whip-smart staging and a script which resists sentimentality in favour of something much more powerful: a straight-up journey to try to save someone in your family. This is about the intense tug of care and duty, which all of us – outside of the Home Office at any rate – feel.
As the show ends with a reminder that migrants are around us, often ‘invisible’ on the street, and even writers as world-renowned as Ibrahima are still restricted, it’s impossible not to leave without new eyes on the world. Gyabaah’s Ibrahima is a compelling new hero.
