Giles Woodforde enthuses about the acting in the title role of a riveting play

Poet and playwright Lemn Sissay could have been born to adapt Benjamin Zephaniah’s 2001 teen novel Refugee Boy for the stage. The book is about Alem, a 14-year-old Ethiopian-Eritrean boy’s turbulent passage through the British care system, after he was brought to the UK by his father and then abandoned. Sissay was rejected by his own Ethiopian-Eritrean parents, and brought up by a foster family in a small Lancashire town.

As this West Yorkshire Playhouse production opens, people carrying suitcases hurry to and fro across a semi-derelict urban landscape — Emma Williams’ atmospheric multi-level set design works brilliantly. A wholly appropriate feeling of restless, continuous movement and impermanence is created.

As his father departs for home, Alem pitches up in a children’s home, where he meets the much taller and intimid-ating Mustapha (Dwayne Scantlebury). “Do. You. Want. Those. Chips?” asks Mustapha, spacing out each word in a menacing tone. Alem is confused: he assumes that Do. You. Want. Those. Chips. is Mustapha’s name. Worse is to come when Alem encounters Sweeney (Dominic Gately), a white racist bully.

After a while, Alem is allocated to fos-ter parents Mr and Mrs Fitzgerald (Dom-inic Gately doubling up in a second role, and Becky Hindley). The Fitzgeralds are a rough hewn, but kind and thoroughly decent couple, who have a resident handful of aggravation: she’s Ruth, their stroppy teenage daughter (Sarah Vezmar). In a stellar performance, Fisayo Akinade presents Alem as an optimistic, warm personality. He exudes the feeling of a soft, bouncing ball, and it takes a lot to depress him. He wears down bully Sweeney’s antagonism, then proceeds to disarm Ruth’s ill-disguised resentment at his presence in her home. Only when he is put in front of a Home Office asylum tribunal does he despair. And who can blame him, for the tribunal is a chilling affair, conducted by officials who plainly have a quota of ill-prepared cases to rush through in a morning.

Refugee Boy deals with several serious issues, of course, but Lemn Sissay’s script is also packed with sparkling one-liners, and humorous exchanges of dialogue. Gail McIntyre directs at a cracking pace, and brings out the deeply humane goodness to be found in each leading character. The cast of six, all playing multiple roles, is exemplary.

Alas, this riveting production only toured to the Oxford Playhouse for a couple of days, but it is at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre from April 8-12.