Blair Gyabaah plays Ibrahima as an effervescent kid, happy, warm, a child who will do anything for other people, but has to work from a young age to help support his family after his father dies. Gyabaah makes for an engaging host for the story, addressing the audience eye-to-eye, which makes what follows all the more heartbreaking. His brother leaves home and goes missing, and as Ibrahima travels across countries to find him – walking across deserts, working on building sites, falling into the hands of human traffickers, tortured in slave markets, hitching lifts on motorbikes, trucks and dinghies – we slowly see the smile worn from his face, the glint in his eye dimmed.
Little Brother at Jermyn Street Theatre: ‘a near-miraculous feat’
