Inua Ellams: Search Party – Donmar Warehouse, London

An evening of poetry with Inua Ellams is a great way to reopen the Donmar Warehouse. On this week so still time to snap up a ticket.

Inua Ellams

Hello, dear readers. Today’s entry is a quick post about an event I went to yesterday evening at the Donmar Warehouse, and which is on until this Saturday (25 September). It’s mainly to urge you to check it out if you have an evening spare this week, as I don’t think you will regret it.

Search Party is an evening of poetry with Inua Ellams. Long-time readers may remember that I saw his monologue, An Evening With An Immigrant, last year at the Bridge Theatre. Actually that was almost exactly a year ago – wow! Time flies when you lose all sense of reality in a pandemic… Anyway, I really enjoyed the earlier show, and so was pleased to have another opportunity to see Ellams perform. I was also intrigued by the concept.

Search Party

In Search Party, the poems Ellams reads are determined by the audience. Ellams comes armed with an iPad, and audience members call out words. Ellams then searches for poems containing that word, and chooses one to read out. Like An Evening With An Immigrant, each poem is grounded in its context within his life. The reason I was so keen to see Search Party is this open and honest energy which Ellams brings to his performances. It’s rare to see someone who connects to easily with an audience, and makes the ‘interactive’ part a little less intimidating for the old introverts like me. Ellams has charisma in spades – you will leave wishing that you were more like him, or at least cool enough to hang out together.

On our evening, a variety of audience words (think ‘dogs’, ‘Christmas’, ‘sky’) returned a variety of poems which still seemed to skillfully tie together. With a brief Q&A and a finale of selecting poems from a collection by number, we were done. A punchy one hour which left me wanting more. Something that I really value about our experience of the last 18 months is that I’ve seen a much wider range of arts and culture than usual. Partly this is because I’ve been more open to what is on despite all the obstacles. And partly it’s that theatres have been a bit more creative with their programming. The Donmar is after all where I first got back into a theatre building last year to see Blindness. And reopening with a freeform poetry evening finished off with a DJ set is undeniably cool. Long may it last.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 4/5

Search Party on until 25 September 2021