The 14th Tale is part of portfolio of shows that has been brought to the Edinburgh Fringe by the London based theatre company, Fuel.
The sextet of productions includes Melanie Wilson’s hypnotic and beautiful Iris Brunette and Sound&Fury’s captivating Kursk; there’s also Love Letters Straight From Your Heart, which according to her Guardian review made Lyn Gardner weep, and the Clod Ensemble’s Under Glass.
This BAC Scratch Commission is probably the most straightforward production on the list: a solo show by spoken word artist Inua Ellams.
It's just him alone in what is probably one of the Pleasance Courtyard’s smallest spaces, the Baby Grand, essentially a (not overly) glorified Portakabin, and yet Ellams is such a fluid, fluent and engaging speaker that he transcends the space, carrying his audience off to other places.
An accomplished storyteller, Ellams tells a tale loosely based on his own childhood memories. One of “a long line of troublemakers” he was born in Nigeria but later moved to London and then to Dublin. The piece perfectly captures the scrapes and pranks of his childhood, whether writing his name in pee in the schoolhouse wall or constructing an elaborate toothpaste-based revenge scheme for a bully; his wicked giggle when he discovers that British schoolteachers aren’t allowed to cane the children in their care spreads through the room like a suppressed giggle, utterly infectious.
The language throughout is rich, rhythmic and lyrical, with each word well-judged. The story skips and dances along but is kept grounded by a ‘present day’ scene set in a hospital to which Ellams keeps returning and from the start it is clear that the boy he takes such delights in describing will eventually be required to become more responsible, that circumstances will force him to grow up and enter an adult world. This transition, when it comes, is handled subtly and with the same syntactical adventurousness and richness of expression as the more humorous episodes.
By opening with one of these hospital scenes, with Ellams sitting head-bowed with a red stain on his T-shirt, it’s all too easy to expect the narrative to be headed in a certain direction, to be going down a predictable path. When this doesn’t happen, when the reality of the situation is revealed, it is all the more satisfying.
The piece could probably do with a little more structure; as it stands it’s still a fairly loose collection of episodes, but these are related with such charm and energy that ultimately it doesn't much matter.
