A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain

‘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.

‘A stunning, devastating excoriation of the Home Office’s hostile environment policy that never forgets the human lives at its core’
- Observer

‘A captivating story… powerful, heart-wrenching and mesmeric’
- The Skinny

‘Resonant, at once recognisable and heightened… a modern-day story of emigration [that] has no happily ever after certainty’
- Guardian

‘A slyly told story, one which is buoyantly playful and yet undercut with sadness… a lovely show and a sobering one’
- Stagedoor