Sherling Studio – Lighthouse, Poole’s Centre for the Arts
Wednesday 15 March at 8pm
Tickets: £14
Discounts: U18s, Students, Seniors, ATL, Live For 5
Tickets & information 01202 280000
www.lighthousepoole.co.uk
Booking Fees: Prices quoted are for tickets booked in person at the Ticket Office. Tickets booked by telephone or online are subject to a booking fee of up to £1.75 per ticket
Inua Ellams brings his new show An Evening with an Immigrant to Lighthouse, Poole’s Centre for the Arts on 15 March as part of the Black Theatre Live touring project.
Born to a Muslim father and a Christian mother in what is now considered by many to be Boko Haram territory, in 1996 award-winning poet and playwright Inua Ellams left Nigeria for England aged 12, moved to Ireland for three years, before returning to London and starting work as a writer and graphic designer.
Part of this story was documented in his hilarious autobiographical Edinburgh Fringe First award-winning play, The 14thTale, but much of it is untold. Littered with poems, stories and anecdotes, Inua 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 a place to call home.
As well as being a truly original writer, Inua is a hugely engaging performer. In 2010 he was long-listed for the Alfred Fagan Award for playwrights of African and Caribbean descent. After winning its Fringe First Award, The 14th Tale toured the UK and finally ran at the National Theatre.
Black Theatre Live is a pioneering national consortium of 8 regional theatres. Following the consortium’s first tours in 2015 of Macbeth and She Called Me Mother starring Cathy Tyson and award-winning The Diary of a Hounslow Girl and the UK’s first all-black Hamlet in 2016 , An Evening with An Immigrant is the project’s latest small-scale tour.
In addition to Lighthouse the consortium includes Tara Arts (London), Derby Theatre, Queen’s Hall Arts (Hexham), Theatre Royal Margate, Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds, Key Theatre (Peterborough) and Stratford Circus Arts Centre (London). Collectively the theatres are committed to effecting lasting change for Black. Asian Minority Ethnic theatre through a concerted programme of commissions and touring, and audience and sector development. It is supported by Arts Council England, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, John Ellerman Foundation and the Ernest Cook Trust.
