Mischa is a half white/half black boy who struggles to fit in. Despite his mother’s love, his intelligence and ability, he dies aged 19 during a police chase. With the help of Mischa’s family Chickenshed have turned his true story into an incredibly powerful dazzling piece of physical and musical theatre.

Chickenshed involved the community Mischa grew up in, in Islington, and one of his friends, Loren Jacobs (pictured), plays him in the show. The story is told mainly through a series of pre-recorded monologues played out as the characters express their emotions in beautifully choreographed dance. The show is peppered with songs, from emotional ballads to edgy rap songs, devised by the performers and friends of Mischa.

The story unfolds through the eyes of Mischa’s mother (played by Belinda McGuirk) who is helpless to stop her beloved brown-skinned son slip away from her and fall in with a bad crowd. McGuirk expresses the emotions felt by the single mother so well that you would have to be made of stone not to feel a lump in your throat at some point during the show.

The action is continually spliced with excerpts from the inquest into Mischa’s death. The clinical language of the inquest creates a jarring contrast to the raw love and grief felt by his mother and father. The cast use boxes as props which they interact with during their dance routines. We see the boxes trap Mischa and eventually become his coffin. This seems symbolic of the boxes society wishes people to fit into, like the ethnic origin tick boxes on official forms, which infuriate Mischa’s mother.

The newspaper front page showing Mischa’s body on the street is projected on to the stage. So is footage of a police car chase and photos of Mischa as he grew up. This drives reality of what happened home with extraordinary force.

As the Mother of a Brown Boy is devastatingly sad but watching it and knowing how it came to be is inspirational.

It clearly inspired an audience of both young and old from diverse backgrounds to attend.