'We all live under the same sky.
It's just that, beneath that sky, there's some arsehole saying, "Don't stand here, stand over there and shut your mouth."'
Elif shears sheep for a rich landowner. Every other waking hour she spends queuing outside the palace, hoping that the King will let her live within the city walls. She comes from a faraway land. She is searching for sanctuary. And this is what we call a 'hostile environment'.
Sami Ibrahim's play A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain is a poetic fable about an impenetrable immigration system that mirrors our own. It premiered in Paines Plough's Roundabout in 2022, including a run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, as a co-production between Paines Plough and Rose Theatre, Kingston, in association with the Gate Theatre, London.
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'A stunning, devastating excoriation of the Home Office's hostile environment policy that never forgets the human lives at its core'
" - Observer
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'A captivating story... powerful, heart-wrenching and mesmeric'
" - The Skinny
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'Resonant, at once recognisable and heightened... a modern-day story of emigration [that] has no happily ever after certainty'
" - Guardian
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'A slyly told story, one which is buoyantly playful and yet undercut with sadness... a lovely show and a sobering one'
" - Stagedoor
