Dominic Gately is a dangerously coiled spring as a swaggering hard-nut from the children's home whose abusive upbringing has locked him into a cycle of violence Dwayne Scantlebury plays a lad whose obsessive recognition of every passing vehicle ('Golf GTI – wicked') is at first hilarious and later heartbreaking, as it becomes apparent that he is trying to identify the car his father drove off in.īecky Hindley and Rachel Caffrey, as Alem's foster mother and sister, provide a sympathetic account of the surrogate family's dilemma, attempting to bond with a succession of difficult incomers, only to be devastated when they eventually leave. Yet it is to Sissay and Zephaniah's credit that even the bullies are granted a sufficient backstory to account for their behaviour. 'Look at you,' sneers one of the kids who has been tormenting him. He is both studious and vulnerable – he cannot fathom why his British classmates seem so reluctant to share his delight in Charles Dickens – but shows a fighting spirit even with the most comically inappropriate of weapons. And, while it would be perilously easy for a play that weaves between war zones, children's homes and court hearings to seem more like a subject for discussion than a drama, the playful, obstinate and courageously humorous tone of Zephaniah's writing shines through.Īt its heart is a performance by Fisayo Akinade of such candour, charm and charisma that it is impossible not to become deeply engaged by the attempts of the young protagonist, Alem, to find his feet in a cold, hostile and confusing country. Sissay was rejected by his own Ethiopian-Eritrean parents, and brought up by a foster family in a small town in Lancashire. F or the poet and playwright Lemn Sissay, adapting Benjamin Zephaniah's 2001 novel about a 14-year-old Ethiopian-Eritrean boy's turbulent passage through the British care system seems so apt as to be almost inevitable.

Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah