Simon Ward reviews The Boy at Soho Theatre

The blackboard outside the theatre, and the theatre staff, warn as one enters that Joakim Daun’s beguiling new play deals with sensitive issues – a warning all the more ominous for being so vague. And, indeed, the themes touched upon include the trauma of losing a parent or a child, of being wrenched from one’s home and of being transported halfway across the world to a place where you don’t know anyone, you don’t speak the language and you have no money. Not to mention tragedy, violence and hopeless nightmares. So, yes, sensitive. But also sensitively and, in fact, brilliantly handled. While we share in the frustrations, anger aand pain of the characters, writer Daun, director Maria Jose Andrade and actors Eva von Elgg (The Boy), Jerome Ngonadi (The Man) and Shereen Roushbalani (The Woman) ensure that we are not overwhelmed. Eva von Elgg, in particular, is a delight from start to finish as they perfectly inhabit the world of a ten-year-old boy. While Ngonadi and Roushbalani play all the other adult roles, von Egg is always and only the boy, swinging his legs, playing football and climbing trees. Only when he sleeps do the nightmares of losing his Mama bubble to the surface.

The plot centres around the boy and the man escaping from an unspecified land to arrive in another, hopefully safer one. They are not related, but share a language and culture, and the man feels a responsibility to care for the boy and he pretends that they are father and son as he tries to navigate the labyrinthine process of becoming an accepted ‘newcomer’. The well-known challenges of learning a new language, integrating into a new culture while maintaining one’s own are all made fresh for us by the boy’s naive and artless questions.

Roushbalani has the uneviable task of both representing the authorities endlessly interrogating their rights to be in the country and the stepmum who can give the boy the stability that he needs. She is utterly convincing in all parts and effortlessly changes register without missing a beat. Ngonadi, too, moves deftly between the native and immigrant world in his roles, and his frustration in the face of the baffling bureauracy is palpable.

Crucially none of the characters here are perfect, they are all damaged and messy, and every move is a kind of compromise, but that makes the final sort-of reconciliation all the more poignant and realistic.

Although careful to be light and playful in tone, the message of this piece is vitally important, especially today as culture wars rage over ‘illegal immigrants’. These are people like us. Yes, different in some ways, but the same in the most fundamental ways. As an uneasy alliance emerges to give the boy the room and space he needs to grow, it’s clear that the adults at large need to learn from the children.

The Boy runs at the Soho Theatre, 21 Dean Street, London W1D 3NE, until Saturday 4th November.