The 14th Tale at Battersea Arts Centre

The 14th Tale at Battersea Arts Centre

22 October, 2009
by: Naima Khan

The 14th  Tale at the BAC is a deeply personal but light-hearted invitation into Inua Ellams' childhood: his most worrying times, childhood conflicts and hilarious acts of revenge. He draws his audience into his life, his walks home with his father, the parental wisdoms that follow and his pre-adolescent heart to hearts about poo.

Transforming seamlessly between his blaspheming childhood self and his reprimanding bible teacher, Ellams makes you wish you'd been at school with that smart mouth kid who had a theory on everything including plumbing at the time of Moses. It's these scenes that Ellams shows off his ability to bring back to life folk he's left behind and to zone in on what makes the people in our lives characters we'll be talking about for years.

When he's not acting as such, he provides an enthralling, rhythmic, poetic commentary on events, pulling you along with every delicate emotion mixed into each moment of his episodes. Ellams' comic timing is spot on and the whole 55 minutes brilliantly paced. The stories and the history of in essence, a prank-playing little git, will stand out for some; for others it'll be the melding of theatre and poetry. The near perfect prose captivates the audience, changing in pace and tone, sometimes tripping up over itself but never lost – unless you're trying to make notes in the dark like one of those reviewer people.

The 14th Tale is a young man's search into his ancestry: an attempt to find out how he came to be the way he is, in the place he is, doing the things he does. It makes you wonder not just about your own ancestry but your progeny and which of your own stories will go down in history. Does it challenge our perception of what it's like to be a young black man in London? Not really, but it does draw attention to what it's like to be a reluctant and faltering ambassador of your country of origin, and there's something in that for a lot of Londoners. Essentially, it enthralls and endears us to the new kid at school, the rejected romantic, and the son whose time to shine has finally come.

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Naima Khan