Sitting in Limbo review – a rallying cry for the Windrush outrage

Watford Palace theatre
Philip J Morris’s stage adaptation of the Bafta-winning film tells it straight as Anthony Bryan’s life is ripped apart

The voice of Theresa May opens this stage version of the Bafta-winning film Sitting in Limbo. It is 2013 and soon, she tells us, it will be harder for illegal immigrants to live in the UK. Her words are a chilling prophecy for the horrors of what is to come over the next hour.

This is the story of Anthony Bryan who came to the UK from Jamaica with his mother when he was eight years old. He has lived there ever since, has a job and a family, and his mum spent 25 years working as a nurse for the NHS. “I’m British,” he says proudly. Philip J Morris’s production is a straight retelling of Bryan’s life shattering into pieces, after he receives a letter from the Home Office. While it is theatrically safe his tale is an incomprehensible, brutal tragedy.